Structure Editor : Printing Facilities

The Structure Editor provides facilities that allow you to easily control how you want your structures to be paginated (note this pagination affects both the standard paper-based printing plus the optional Structure Publisher output, if installed). There are basically three approaches:

Manually assigning subtrees to pages - you tell the Structure Editor which boxes are page breaks, and then use the page-layout view facilities described below to make sure everything fits on the pages. You can assign/remove page breaks using the Tree Editing Area right-click pop-up menu. When assigned, page breaks appear as small green diamond shapes above boxes.
Automatically assigning subtrees to pages - you use the Page Break Wizard (launched from the Tools menu) to automatically allocated page-breaks based on certain thresholds for nodes per page
Using 'Wallpaper' printing - the Structure Editor allocates a grid of pages that cover the entire structure, and which you can put together after printing. No page breaks are required.

For all three approaches you will usually start by selecting Page View from the drop-down list on the toolbar. Here is a screen shot of the Structure Editor window before doing this:

And here is what happens after entering page mode. By default the pages are laid out like wallpaper. This ensures that the whole structure gets printed although might not achieve the desired page boundaries :-

In this case the Structure Editor has worked out that the whole structure can be covered by three pages. You may be happy with this. However if you would like the structure spread over more or less pages, you can alter the logical page size using the

buttons. Clicking

twice makes the whole structure fit on just two pages:

Alternatively, clicking

quite a few times results in this:

If instead of using the wallpaper approach, you wanted to use explicit page-breaks you would deselect the 'Wallpaper' checkbox on the toolbar. Note if no explicit page-breaks are defined then only the first page (with the root node) will be shown. In the following example four explicit page breaks have been assigned :-

The Structure Editor starts with a default logical page size which allows a 'reasonable' number of boxes to fit on a page. Notice that it has arranged one of the pages in landscape orientation to make the boxes fit. If, after trying both landscape and portrait orientations, the Structure Editor cannot make the boxes fit, it colours the page pink - those whose boxes do fit are coloured green.

If the boxes do not fit you can do two things - either add more page breaks, or increase the logical page size.

To make the boxes fit by adding more page breaks, do the same as you would before you entered page mode - i.e. use the Tree Editing Area right-click pop-up menu. (The fact that you can still do this in page mode illustrates an important point - almost everything you could do before entering page mode is also possible when in it. In fact 'page mode' is just a slight variation of normal interaction within the Tree Editing area, where page outlines are shown, and the box layout algorithm takes the page boundaries into account.)

To make the boxes fit by altering the logical page size, use the and buttons. Here is the result of pressing the button twice:

Although the boxes now all fit onto pages, some of the pages don't have much on them, so you would probably change the page break allocation at this stage.

After having arranged the pagination, either though page breaks or 'wallpaper', you can then print the structure by selecting Print on the right-click pop-up menu. This will display the Print Dialog :-

If a single page is selected when the Print Dialog is displayed then the option to print just that page will be available. The structure can be printed in colour or black & white, and as images only or with 'text', where 'text' is the operations, conditions, headers and trailers for the structure.

Note: When OK is pressed a further print dialog will be displayed by the operating system, allowing selection of the printer, number of copies, etc...