Need a handout for your next meeting? Need a large scale printed visual for your next project? SmartDraw can help you out! SmartDraw has a variety of printing options that will fit any of the desired outputs you might need. Plus, SmartDraw shows you exactly what you will be printing with the Print Preview. This allows you see exactly what will be coming out of the printer. SmartDraw has a single, unlimited work area that automatically expands to accommodate your drawing. Most visuals have "Print to One Page" as a default. This means SmartDraw will proportionally shrink your drawing down to the actual page size you are printing to, no matter how large the drawing is in SmartDraw. This is why the Print Preview can be very helpful.
To access the Print Preview, seleft the "File" tab located at the top left of your SmartDraw window and select the "Print" option. The Print Preview window will be displayed to the right of the Print menu options.
While working on your visual in SmartDraw, when the "Print to One Page" command is selected the page margins will not appear on the work area. If you would like to see the page margin lines on the work area, select "Print to Actual Size" instead of "Print to One Page" in the Print menu. The page margin lines should then be visible on the work area if it is larger than a single page. If you wish to have a multi-page document, where each diagram fits within its own page, you can manually position your visual within the boundaries of each page on the work area.
You can also control how large your work area should be by number of pages. To do this, go to the Page tab and choose "Work Area" to define how many pages across and down you want the work area to be.
Printing Custom Page Sizes
So, how about the printing options for a size larger than your average printer? Many of our customers need to print visuals that are much too large to print in office. This is where our PDF Export options comes in handy!
First, navigate to the Page tab, then click the Margins menu, and select Custom Margins.
A dialog window will pop up. Here, you will want to choose the printer to be SmartDraw PDF Export. Also, we recommend checking "Use the minimum margins for this printer"
To set your custom page size, click on the Properties button next to the Printer selection. Here you can enter in the width and height you want your visual to be. Just make sure you define a size that your printer service (FedEx, etc) can handle. Here is a list of commonly used paper sizes for your reference.
Once you are done configuring your settings, click OK all the way out of the windows and you will see the page margin lines disappear as the page size resets itself. Now, click the Export to PDF button at the top of the SmartDraw window. Once it is exported, be sure to open the file and check that everything looks okay.
If you have
any other questions about this, feel free to comment below or email us!
