Visustin - Print flow charts

Select Print Preview in the File menu or press press to bring up the Print Preview window.

Print Preview window

Print Print the picture with to the selected printer with the current options.

Setup Choose print properties such as printer, page size and orientation. You can override the Windows printer defaults with this feature. For example, if the picture would be better printed horizontally, choose landscape mode via the printer setup. If your printer has a resolution setting, set the resolution to 600 DPI or higher. At 300 DPI the charts may look jagged.

Resize. Scale the picture to fit in the desired paper size. This dropdown list is useful with large flow charts. A flow chart that requires several pages can be decreased to fit on fewer pages. The dropdown lists the best scaling factors by which the picture still fits in a given number of sheets (such as 1 page, 1x2 pages and 2x3 pages). You can enter any scaling factor from 5% to 1000%. Write a factor above 100% to increase the picture size. Notice, however, that the print quality may deteriorate if you decrease or increase the picture too much. Experiment to find the settings that work best with your printer. If you get a dim print-out, try Options to make the chart smaller and use the vector printing tip below.

Position by dragging. You can drag the flow chart to move it. Move the mouse pointer over the flow chart and drag by keeping the left mouse button pressed. This way you can center the picture on the page or position a multipage graph in order to maximize legibility at page boundaries.

Empty pages. A multi-page chart may include empty sheets. Visustin detects them. They are greyed out in the print preview. Empty pages are not printed.

Exclude pages from being printed. You can avoid printing unnecessary pages by right-clicking the undesired pages. A red cross over the page indicates the page will be excluded from the printout (see screenshot above). You can also use this option to print just a portion of the flow chart. Just right-click those pages you don't want to print. Right-click again to enable printing.

Margins. Visustin detects the printable area of your printer and displays page margins automatically. Most printers have a physical margin where programs cannot print. Visustin uses all the available area but cannot print in the margin area. You can see the margins in the preview. If you construct a multipage mosaic, you will notice the margins on the printed pages.

Printing tips

Vector printing. By default, opening Print Preview from the main window of Visustin prints a bitmap. Bitmaps don't scale well when printed. If you wish to squeeze a large image to a small area, print via Editor. First press Editor and then .

Large chart printing. If you have a very large flow chart to print, you can use a combination of tricks to get the best printouts.

Select a small font size in the Options menu.
Hide comments via the Options menu in the main window.
Control the chart area with the choices of the Options menu in the main window.
Use the Resize dropdown to fit the chart on a reasonable number of pages.
Black & White charts may allow for resizing to a smaller number of pages. Color charts may require a better resolution, thus more space.
Split the code in several pieces to print 2 or more simpler charts.
Remove any unnecessary code. It often happens that code contains large blocks of uninteresting or easily understood lines. The lines may contain initialization, data or error handling, for example. Remove these lines to display a smaller chart and focus on the interesting or complex parts.
Create a partial flow chart. Select the code you wish to chart, then press Preview.

It's not always possible to print all the information on a single sheet of paper. Therefore, reduce the information and use the options in a clever way to produce great documentation for your code.

Read more about dealing with large flow charts.

Printing is disabled in the demo version.