11. Printing Visio Diagrams

Print is a little five-letter word. It really shouldn’t be complicated. We have all felt the angst of intending to print one thing and getting something else entirely. Also, we live in a society that is becoming ever more aware of being ecologically friendly, which translates to using eco settings and less paper when we print. Nevertheless, printing diagrams may often be needed for handouts at meetings, advertising, hard copies for review, or plans for a worksite.

Visio diagrams range from simple and sleek to sprawling multipage complex diagrams that can be intimidating to look at, much less print. How do you select the parts you want to print and avoid taking out a forest? This chapter considers these questions as it analyzes the Print settings and options that Visio provides.

This section focuses on the factors that you have control over when you print Visio content as you look at the basic settings within Visio and their purpose. After all, it is embarrassing when the print job failed because you made a mistake, right?

The prominent Print button sends the job to the printer using the settings displayed. It does not get much easier than that. You can quickly choose a different printer from the Printer drop-down list. Notice that the status of printers is shown; this may help you immediately avoid problems by sending your job to a printer that is ready rather than to one offline.

Aside from the Ready status, you can use the information icon to see more detailed information regarding the connection or the IP address (see Figure 11.2).

Just below the Printer button is a link labeled Printer Properties. This brings up the properties of the printer that was installed in your operating system. You would get the same results opening the printer properties from Devices and Printers or the Control Panel in Windows. As you can see in Figure 11.3, these settings are unique to the printer installed. Although not all printers have the same options, you can expect to find certain basic settings here, such as color, quality, print selection, duplexing and paper settings.

Uncollated means that all copies of page 1 are printed, then all of page 2, and so on. You may want this if another step is needed for a specific page before assembling the copies for distribution.

In the status bar below the drawing window, you can see the status for sent print jobs until they are completed.

In Visio there is a Page Break preview that can be useful when locating shapes that extend past the page size. Figure 11.6 shows the same view you see in your drawing window. It doesn’t look too bad, right?

Now check to see what the actual printed pages will look like. Remember that your drawing may occupy a single drawing page, but the print job for your drawing can be spread across several sheets of printer paper. To the left of the Zoom control is a small button that is grayed out for drawings that are contained in a single page size. The drawing in Figure 11.6 has at least four paper pages to print this drawing based on the dashed page breaks that are visible. Click this icon to Show/Hide Page Breaks. Figure 11.7 shows the result, and you can decide if you are happy with the way the print job will print or if some rearranging is called for. This useful feature removes any concerns you may have before sending files to the printer.

Another option is built in to Windows and Visio; you can choose Microsoft XPS Document Writer in your list of printers (see Figure 11.8). This creates an image that again corresponds to what is printed on paper. Windows has an XPS Viewer, which is normally included in the operating system. In Windows 7, for example, click Start and type XPS. The XPS Viewer is listed.

A separate feature on printed pages refers to the top and bottom areas of a document referred to as headers and footers. These have counterparts in the visual drawing window, but this chapter talks about print features.

Notice the results in Figure 11.9 of various header and footer assignments to a drawing that has been printed. This additional information is visible only on a printed output of the Visio drawing and is not visible in the drawing window. The capability to add information when printing provides some nice ways to reference a printout when there are many printed pages and identify the date the drawing was printed, which can help avoid confusion if changes have been made or if the printout is used for review.

Refer to Figure 11.10 to see what can be added to the header and footer. The fields you can choose from are limited in scope and will use information specific to the print job. For example, page number and total printed pages will be related to which printed page and how many total printed pages are included.

These same nine information sources can be assigned to the Left, Center, or Right of either the header or footer sections. The drawing in Figure 11.9 used all but the Footer Center location. Click Choose Font, and you can adjust the font, font style, size, color, script, and use strikeout or underline effects.

→ To learn more about inserting visible header and footer fields to your drawings, see page 157.

You can adjust the location of your header and footer information by adjusting the Margin setting, as shown in Figure 11.11. This also refers to the distance from the top or bottom of the printable area, but it is not the same as the print margins discussed next. Be careful with this adjustment because if you have shapes or background page data near the edge of the paper, this may create an undesirable overlap; check the results with the print preview pane.

1. Open the Page Setup dialog box by pressing Shift+F5, or from the Print Settings pane using the link below Settings labeled Page Setup.

2. On the Print Setup tab, click the button labeled Setup to open the Print Setup dialog box.

3. In the Print Setup dialog box, you can adjust the margins for left, right, top, and bottom (see Figure 11.12.) Notice additional settings here, such as Center for smaller drawings.

4. Click OK to save changes to Print Setup and click OK again to close the Page Setup dialog box.

Look closely at the Print Settings pane and at the section labeled Settings. Settings presents you with a group of drop-down boxes to configure the print job. Print All Pages is set by default. (Isn’t it great how it sums it up with “The whole thing”?) Notice the other choices offered for the document in the drop-down in Figure 11.13.

Remember that the default is Print All Pages, which prints all pages in your Visio file. The other options allow you to be more selective.

1. In the drawing window, zoom into a drawing and pan until you see the area you would like to print.

2. Press Ctrl+P to jump to the Print menu. In the Print Settings pane under Settings, click Print All Pages to view other options.

3. Select Current View (see Figure 11.14). Notice the Preview pane adjusts to show the area that was visible in the drawing window.

4. Click Print, and you’re done.

The print job is what is displayed in the Print Preview pane. There might be a slight difference between the Preview pane and the drawing window as Visio fills the paper; it may include more vertical or horizontal real estate.

One of the options shown in Figure 11.14, Custom Print, focuses the print job on a range of pages. You can alter the page number fields labeled Pages, and To and Custom Print are automatically selected.

Look at Figure 11.15. Under Settings, you see Pages: 2 to 4. In this document, which could have dozens of pages, you are focused on printing only pages 2 through 4. Notice the Print Preview pane shows 1 of 3 pages that you can scroll through. When you press Print, only those three pages are printed.

If you decide that you want to print a background page, make sure you have assigned this background to a foreground page first. When this page is printed it will include the background page content by default unless you have unchecked this option.

→ To learn more about background pages, see page 64.

Notice High Quality is also listed here. This feature is explained toward the end of the chapter.

You can also click and drag the pointer over an area and select a group of shapes and connectors if that is faster or easier.

Notice how easy it is to select what is printed by using predefined layers. Figure 11.19 shows plans for a conference room upgrade with furniture and some communications equipment installed. You can print this image without all the furniture so that you can focus on the equipment that needs to be installed in this room.

From the Home tab, click Layers and then Layer Properties to open the Layer Properties dialog box. The Furniture and Movable Furnishings are unchecked in the Print column. The results of this change can be seen immediately in the Print Preview pane shown in Figure 11.20.

Many layers are created automatically when you place shapes and connectors on your drawings, and it may be very simple to make selections like this one. Visio also allows you to create new layers as needed and assign content according to your criteria. In any case, printing or not printing a layer is a simple choice you can make.

→ To learn more about creating and using layers, see page 163.

To print gridlines, select the Page Setup link from the main Print Settings pane. Figure 11.12 shows both the Page Setup link and the Page Setup dialog box that this opens. Select Gridlines at the bottom of the Print Setup tab to enable this feature in the printed copy.

High Quality is a setting that changes the print output from the default optimized draft mode to a high-quality mode. You may not often see any difference, because the draft mode provides very sharp print quality. So what is the difference?

When Visio (and other Office products) prints a document, it does not include some visual effects that are seen in the drawing window unless you ask it to. Shadows are a good example. To print this effect takes extra time and slows down the printer. Visio removes these effects to improve speed. In Figure 11.21 you can see two Visio windows overlapped with the same content. Drawing2 in the lower window has High Quality enabled, and you can see that a shadow effect for the shape and connector is visible in the Print Preview window. This effect was removed in the Drawing1 document by default.

Other settings you can check using Printer Properties are unique to your printer. Make sure that you are using the equivalent of best or high in your printer’s settings rather than draft or normal if the quality is not as good as desired. Also, some known techniques work well when you’re dealing with certain quality issues. You will see a reference to this in Chapter 16, “Additional Visio Resources”.