Help: Printing TextPlus Charts

Printing a TextPlus Chart

This website can produce two "TextPlus" (aka "Text+") charts that are distinctive to the software that drives this site. One of the charts shows a person's ancestors, and the other shows a person's descendants. The primary virtues of Text+ charts are that, relative to other charts, they can
  • Print more information about each person,
  • Format dates and places more flexibly, and
  • Print more generations in the width of a browser window or printed page
And though they are definitely not graphical charts, they do draw vertical lines to provide visual clues about the structure of the chart and the family.
Like many reports and charts on the World Wide Web, the Text+ Charts have a "Format for Printing" (sometimes call "printer-friendly") page that removes menus and banners that don't need to be printed, and that give you some options to tweak the report before it is printed. This help page is meant to help you
  1. Adjust, with limited options, charts displayed on the computer screen, and
  2. Adjust, with several options, charts that are to be printed

Printing Problems

Here's a small 3-generation clip from a Text+ ancestor chart, the way it supposed to look. (Text+ Descendant Charts look different from this, but have the same printing dilemmas and printing process.)
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When you generate a Text+ Chart, you have to tell the program how wide the chart will be. Because the ultimate goal is often to print, the chart widths options are paper sizes. The browser windows can, of course, be adjusted with more precision, but the paper sizes work out fine in the long run.

  1. If the chart is too wide for the web browser window or a printed page, it will look kind of like this:

    In this screen clip, you can see a portion of the Text+ program control menu, where a width was selected for the chart. And you can see that some of the text has been pushed all the way over to the left margin of the page, breaking the chart layout.

    This chart, formatted for the width of letter paper in landscape mode, is just too wide for the web browser window - or for letter paper in Portrait mode, which the outline is intended to simulate.

  2. If the paper (or the web browser) is too wide, you get too much whitespace to right of the chart.

    This isn't such a big deal as the broken formatting that occurs when the chart is too wide. It's fine on the screen, but if your printed chart is more than a page long, it wastes paper.

The same procedures resolve both of these problems.

Resolution Approaches

There are several approaches to the problems that occurs when the chart width doesn't match the paper or browser width.
  1. Make the web browser window wider, producing this:
  2. Use the "Width" option to change the width of the chart itself, producing this:
  3. Use options that change the content of the chart - that is, what data is shown in the chart.
    Both the Text+ ancestor chart and the Text+ descendant chart allow you to change the number of generations (ascending or descending) in the chart. The other the content-control options are different in the ancestor chart and the descendant chart. shown in a menu above the chart itself in the chart's web page.
    These options are shown in the Text+ ancestor chart help page and the Text+ descendant chart help page
  4. Use options on the chart's "Format for Printing" page to change the "shape" of the report by changing
    1. The font size,
    2. The size of each indentation level,
    3. The chart width, as noted above,
    4. A fudge factor that lets you adjust the right margin by a given number of characters.
    The primary purpose of the Format for Printing form is to prepare a report for printing, but the chart is displayed on the screen before it is printed so you can use the Format for Printing page to adjust the shape of the chart just for display if you want.

It it also important to note here that fixing the chart width in your web browser does not necessarily prevent unwanted wrapping when you print the chart. The process for previewing exactly what the chart will look like when printed is described below.

The Format for Printing Page

Like many reports and charts on the World Wide Web, the Text+ Charts have a "Format for Printing" (sometimes call "printer-friendly") page that removes menus and banners that don't need to be printed, and that give you some options to tweak the report before it is printed.

In the Text+ Charts pages, the "Format for Printing" button is in this multi-line menu that is just above the chart itself.

You can see that the paper width control that is highlighted in the screen clips higher on this page is in this multi-line menu.

On the Format for Printing page, which is in black-and-white, this menu replaces the one just above.

The two boxed labeled "Format for Printing" and "Chart Content" are called "fieldsets". The Format for Printing fieldset appears only on the "Format for Printing" page and is identical for Text+ ancestor and descendant charts, whereas the controls in the "Chart Content" fieldset also appear in the main window, but are different for the two Text+ chart types.

The Format for Printing Fieldset

  • The first four controls determine how much text can fit on one line of the chart:
    1. The Indentation for each generation. The default is 6 characters.
    2. Size. The font size; the size of each character in the chart. You don't need to know exactly about "point sizes", you just need to know that
      • Larger numbers produce larger characters, and thus allow less data to fit on a line, and
      • The smallest numbers generate tiny text, which you generally want to avoid unless you want to print a very large chart.
    3. Page Width. This is the paper size that you expect to print on.
    4. +/- n characters. This fudge factor can be used to extend or shorten the lines of data in the Text+ charts. Once you select the first three options, you can use this control to fine-tune the chart width.
  • The next control does not affect the chart width.
    1. Height. This does not affect the height (or the size) of each character; it affects the space between the lines. If the chart looks too crowded, you might want to change the line height. However, be aware that the vertical lines are not drawn as continuous graphical lines, but rather are vertical line characters in each row. If you increase the line height, those vertical line characters may separate, resulting in a dashed line rather than a solid line.
  • The fieldset's buttons deal with saved print settings.
    1. Save as Defaults saves the values of the four spacing controls so that they can be used the next time a Text+ chart is loaded into the Format for Printing page.
    2. Clear my Defaults Erases the defaults you have saved, but does not change the current values. The next time a chart is loaded into the Format for Printing window, it will use defaults that are set in the website configuration.
    The defaults are saved in a "persistent" cookie, which retains it values between browser session so you can come back days or weeks later, and the charts will use your defaults (well, assuming that you have not cleared your cookies and are using the same Web browser from which you saved the cookie.) There are separate cookies for Text+ Ancestor and Descendant charts, but the two cookies are controlled in exactly the same way.

The Content Control Fieldset

These controls determine what data is printed for each person. Except for the number of generations and the Dates&Places options, these controls are different for Text+ ancestor and descendant charts. They are described in more detail in the help pages for each type of Text+ chart.

The content settings that are in effect when you launch the Format for Printing page are carried over to the Format for Printing page. There is no provision for saving these settings, except for the Date and Place settings.

Print Previews

When you are not confident that the chart you are printing will print cleanly, you do not have to waste paper just to see if the chart looks right. Instead, you can use your web browser's "Print Preview" feature to display the chart on the screen as it would appear on the page.

In the Print Preview, you can look for lines that wrap all the way to the left margin of the page, and you can decide whether there is too much white space to the right of the chart.

Significantly, it really doesn't take long at all to do a Print Preview; this is just a step that you don't routinely take when printing other web pages. Hide instructions

If you are content with what you see in the print preview, just print the page.

If you aren't, use the options on the Format for Printing page to adjust the width of the chart, and, if you think it is necessary, do another print preview.

A quick note about another formatting consideration – You might want to see whether just a few lines flow over into the very last printed page in the chart. When that happens, you can adjust the chart as described above in order to shorten the length of the chart, and get those few lines up on the previous page.

Saving your Format for Printing Settings

You shouldn't have to adjust your settings every time you print a chart. As you'll see below, you can save your printer settings. With the saved settings, you will probably be able avoid additional adjustments when you print subsequent charts that are similar in size to the chart you were printing when you saved the settings.
The phrase "similar in size" refers to
  1. Charts that have approximately the same number of generations of ancestors or descendants. But if you saved your settings when you were printing, say, a five-generation chart, there's a good chance that you'll have to adjust them for a chart with more than eight or nine generations.
  2. Charts printed on the same paper size and orientation.

Still, it is generally prudent to do a quick print preview almost every time you print a new Text+ Chart.