On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 02:29:27PM -0400, Michael Ross wrote: > Chris, > The Dia paradigm is a little different. You draw up what ever you like > then you size the page however you want around it.
That's all very well, but see below about scaling. > My drill is like this: > You may need to make the page break lines a contrasting color to your > background (in the Preferences/View Defaults/Page Breaks menu). > preferences persist from session to session so mine are always how I like > them. Background color is under Diagram Defaults, and grid line color is > under Grid Lines. > Er, but this rather conflicts with the first sentence doesn't it? Seeing the page breaks means that you *are* creating a diagram on a page, or at least with an awareness of the page breaks. > I set the Page Set Up to Letter, Landscape, all margins 0.5in top, bottom, > left & right,. and a Scale of around 35% (depending on the monitor I am > using). This gives me a page about the size and shape of my screen. OK, this makes reasonable sense. I've never understood why default margins (on every program I have ever come across) are always so huge. > Whatever I draw inside those lines will print on one page. OK, but as noted below, the symbol libraries are then pretty useless as the symbols are way too big. > Another approach is to turn off the page breaks by giving then the same > color as you background, and just draw whatever you like, and when > completed set the page breaks to contrats again, pick paper size and scale > so it all fits - all after the fact. All OK, except that the symbols I want to use don't scale sensibly, try some of the diode symbols, when you scale them they just become blobs. What I have done previously is to do what you say and then import the diagram into a web page and scale it there (after conversion to Jpeg or whatever), that works fine but I really wanted to create 'pages' of diagrams this time. > Some notes on margins that a lot of people assume differently. > What is displayed on screen is the printed area of the diagram. If you > have one inch margins set all around, then the printed page will have a > 1in margin around. For example an 8.5 x 11 letter page would have a > printed area of 6.5 x 9. Set margins to 0.5in and the printed area will > expand out to 7.5 x 10. Which is not very useful if trying to print multi-page diagrams and stick them together! :-) -- Chris Green _______________________________________________ dia-list mailing list dia-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/dia-list FAQ at http://live.gnome.org/Dia/Faq Main page at http://live.gnome.org/Dia
