Network Diagrams: Tips for Printing From Visio

By request

Michael asked in the com­ments on the Visio Shape Union to put a post together on “some­thing on Visio page siz­ing and print­ing”. Great sug­ges­tion, I got it worked out, and this one is for you.

Underlying Concepts

It seems to me that the idea of print­ing from Visio is not par­tic­u­larly obvi­ous because tt’s a bit dif­fer­ent from what you might be expect­ing when you use Microsoft Office. Lets start by under­stand­ing that the size of the page that you use on the screen does not neces­sar­ily have any rela­tion­ship to the size of the page that you print.

Said another way, the size of the paper that you can print on, is not neces­sar­ily the size that you can define in the doc­u­ment page size.

To demon­strate this I will walk through cre­at­ing a new page and how to set it’s size, and then how to set its’ print size.

Create a new page

Create a new page using Insert/​New Page from the menu. You will get this screen.

Select the Page Size tab and the screen will now show the paper size. By default the Paper Size, FOR JUST THIS PAGE, will match the paper of the cur­rently defined printer.

I recom­mend that you everytime you cre­ate a page, that you should imme­di­ately set the page size. Lets say that you want to use a A3 page:

But your printer driver will default to using A4 paper. So you will get this screen show­ing that the paper size is wrong:

This is not a prob­lem, page siz­ing fix com­ing up

So far so good, we have a Visio page that is set to ALWAYS be A3 in size. If you click OK, and tried to print this out then the printer will vali­antly print some­thing. You will need scis­sors and sticky tape to make it use­ful, but at least the printer tried , right ? As this point you might give up and be happy with what you have.

The solu­tion is to go to Print Setup tab and set the Printer Paper to fit 1 sheet across and 1 sheet down:

You can see the little pic­ture on the right is telling you that the dia­gram will fit on the page.

Changing to Print on A3 Paper

So we have defined the page in Visio to be A3, and that is should be prin­ted on A4 paper. Because A4 paper is exactly HALF the size Visio will scale down the dia­gram at print time. If you now have a printer that can print to lar­ger paper, then you will need to change the Page Setup:

If you later decide that you want to print to A3 for every page in your doc­u­ment, you will need to change the Print Setup for every page . This is because the print con­fig­ur­a­tion is stored for each page in your Visio document.

Some people have the idea that chan­ging the print setup once work for every draw­ing page like say Microsoft Word or Microsoft Excel. Because every draw­ing might be a dif­fer­ent page size, and a dif­fer­ent page print prop­erty, each draw­ing has to be changed manu­ally. In my opin­ion, this is cor­rect behaviour

Some Recommendations perhaps

Most of my draw­ings are done on A3 Page Size, and then prin­ted on A4 paper. This is because I spend most of my time look­ing at the draw­ings on screen. Printing just uses up valu­able resources that very few people even look at so why bother ?

For large and detailed dia­grams, I will often use A0 or A1 Page Size and then print to A3. It gets a bit small, but frankly, you shouldn’t be print­ing this out anyway.

On the other hand, if you have an A0 plot­ter handy then noth­ing, and I mean noth­ing, has more impact in a man­age­ment meet­ing than an A0 dia­gram spread across the board­room table with some felt tip pens draw­ing the con­nectiv­ity from end to end and explain­ing why your pro­ject will take thirty days to deliver and its ‘not just a few fire­wall rules’ that could be done by next week.

Some DONT’s

Don’t fit to draw­ing contents

Don’t set the Page Size to “Size to fit draw­ing con­tents”. When Visio tries to scale the page to your print paper, it will dis­tort the image. For example, if you draw­ing size is 10cm x 10cm and Visio tries to scale that up to 21cm x 29.7cm, then the hori­zontal is going scale 1:2.1, and the ver­tical will scale 1:2.9 thus stretch­ing the image. This is a very bad idea.

Don’t try to set the scale

While someone might know how to use the scale func­tions, I don’t and never needed them.

American Paper Sizes

The ISO met­ric paper sizes are dir­ect mul­tiples when scal­ing. That is, an A2 is twice the size of an A3 page which is twice the size of an A4 page and so on. This means that print­ing from a A3 draw­ing to an A4 page scales correctly.

As far as I can tell, American paper sizes are based on some ran­dom siz­ing sys­tem and scal­ing may need some con­sid­er­a­tion. After some research, I would think that a Letter size (8.5″ x 11″) page should scale to a C Sheet (17″ x 22″) since this is exactly double the size. If you aren’t using these paper sizes, then it is prob­ably time to go out and buy them.

Otherwise you will need to do some math and work out the per­cent­ages for some­thing like a Folio to C Sheet. Enjoy that all you like, but it would be easier to use the right paper.

Any sug­ges­tions or con­firm­a­tion on how this works for American paper sizes would be welcomed.

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