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  Print a document

The print parameters requester

Before AWeb starts printing the current page, you can alter some parameters. You open the print parameters requester with the Project / Print... menu item.

Printer parameters that cannot be controlled in the print parameters window can be changed using the standard Workbench PrinterGfx preferences utility.

Layout width

With this chooser you tell AWeb which width to use to layout the document before sending it to the printer. You are offered three choices:
Window The document will appear exactly as it is displayed in the window. This means that if the document contains wide objects (tables, images) that fall outside the window, these objects will fall off the paper, too.
Document The document takes the full paper width (unless you scale down).
Even if the document contains wide items, the printout will contain all the information. Note that in this case, the document will be laid out again as if it was displayed in a window wide enough to contain all the items. Because of this, it may appear differently from the exact layout as currently displayed in the window.
If the document takes up less space than the current window width, it will appear blown up on the paper, because the document is made to take up the full paper width.
Screen The document is printed as if the screen would take up the paper width. This will produce more uniformly sized printouts, regardless of the current window width or document width. The document is laid out again so the exact layout may differ from that in the window. Note that if the document is wider than the screen, some information will still fall off the paper.

Scale (%)

Here you can change the scale for printing the document. Printing at 100% takes up the full paper width. The document is always printed with an 1:1 (square) aspect ratio, because many if not all pages are designed for this ratio. This means that if you use AWeb on a aspect ratio 1:2 screen (like 640 x 256) the printout is about half in height compared to the screen.

Center

When printing with a scale less than 100%, this checkbox allows the printout to be horizontally centered on the paper.

Formfeed

If this is checked, a formfeed is sent to the printer after printing the document. Without formfeeds, you can print several small documents on one sheet of paper.

Print backgrounds

Some documents have a background colour or a background image that may make the printout quite unreadable. This is especially the case when printing in black and white or greyscale.

If this checkbox is not selected, the background of the page will not be printed, but is left white instead. Furthermore, to gain maximum readability all text is printed in black. The printout of embedded images is not affected.

Print in progress

While AWeb is printing the document, the print in progress requester is shown. You can cancel the current print with the Cancel button. Note that it can take a few seconds before the print is actually cancelled and the requester disappears.

While the document is being printed, you can go on and visit other documents. You cannot start another print though, you will either have to wait until the current printout is ready, or cancel it.

When it doesn't print...

If you run AWeb on a screen with more than 256 colours with OS version 3.1 or lower, printing probably doesn't work. This is not the fault of AWeb, but of the printer driver you are using. Most printer drivers today cannot handle bitmaps with more than 256 colours (8 bits).

You will have to change the screenmode that AWeb is using, and optionally select to load a spread palette. Then printing shouldn't be a problem.

As soon as printer drivers become available that can handle more than 256 colours, like those that come with OS 3.5, you can print from screens with more colours directly.

Technically AWeb could convert everything down to 8-bit, but that would be slow (all images on the page have to be remapped), would require more options (like load spread palette, and the option to disable the conversion if the user has a >8 bit capable printer driver), the remapping of datatypes would need a real visible screen instead of the off-screen bitmap AWeb uses now (datatypes need a Screen to remap themselves to), and would of course make the executable bigger. I don't think applications should kludge around a limitation in other software this way.


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