Even when I change the font size for all my Scapple (which I love: thanks!) 1.4.1 on 12.6 Notes to something as large as 24 pt, although on screen they appear nicely scaled up, they always print almost too small to read.
Infinite words don’t fit very well on a finite page. If you skip the pdf and go directly to print, the OS should give options to spread the image across multiple pages, making it readable, but individual notes are likely to be split across pages: not ideal!
You’ll do better keeping it digital. View it in Scapple or export it as a jpeg.
Have you read 9.3 Printing Scapple Boards in the manual? It describes the printing options Scapple makes available to you.
Have you enabled Scale to fit on one page from Print Preview? If you’re trying to fit a large diagram on one page, then Scapple will decrease the size of everything–shapes, fonts, etc.–to make it fit. For a more legible printed diagram, you might want to try disabling that option and printing to multiple pages.
But I like @drmajorbob’s idea of exporting as jpg. If that isn’t satisfactory, you can take a screenshot of the Scapple diagram and then print the image.
Yes, I downloaded that PDF when I first bought Scapple; thanks.
That’s right, Yes. I got excited, thinking that maybe there was an option that would help me. But my boards really are so small and simple that I ought to be able to view and print them in/on one screen/sheet of paper!
That’s the strange thing, though isn’t it: my Notes are small and few. They would easily fit on one sheet of they were twice as large and the font what I set it to.
It’s almost as though the Scapple print routine were inserting a 40 pt margin around the content!
Something that can help you keep things on pages, instead of cut in between them, is the View ▸ Page Guides menu toggle. That will draw lines around the margin areas, so as long as you keep content within those borders you should be able to print to multiple pages easily.
It is easy to overestimate how little fits on a page though given how things on computer screens tend to look different.
What are your margins settings? Have you selected Portrait or Landscape?
Is Scapple printing the diagram as displayed in the Print Preview or is it printing differently?
From the Scapple editor -
Because you can zoom in and out in the editor, sometimes diagram size can be tricky to judge, as @AmberV alludes to in his post.
If you select View > Actual Size, does that correspond to what you’re seeing when you print with Scale to fit on one page disabled?
On a 27" monitor, your resolution is something like 2560 × 1440 - 3840 x 2160 - meaning your diagram may be a lot bigger than you think. Actual Size will tell you whether this is the case or not.
ETA1 -
As it seems Scapple believes the diagram is very large and is therefore shrinking it, instead of increasing the font size, you might want to counter-intuitively decrease the font to a relatively small 6 or 8. That should greatly shrink the diagram, so maybe it will fit on one page. Try that and see how it prints. You can always zoom in the editor.
ETA1.5 -
I roughly counted the words on what seems to be your largest shape (on top right) and it was around 200. My guess is you have close to if not more than 1,000 words in your diagram. Add in space for shapes and lines, and it’s no wonder it won’t fit on one page without being scaled down. I think you are greatly underestimating the size of this diagram. If your words were purely single spaced text (no shapes or lines), what font size would you need to use to print them on one page? For this diagram, you’ll need to use a smaller font than that, I think.
ETA2 -
At the point of being repetitive, if after playing around with the print settings you still can’t get it to print how you want it–if it already looks great in the editor, take a screenshot and put the image in Word or something, and print from there.
Printing from anywhere, by any method, will have the same issues. If it looks as it did in Scapple, it won’t fit on a page and still be readable, and splitting it into multiple pages can split individual notes. @marksealey can use an image editing program to break it into page-size images, but it’s not the same diagram at that point.
Viewing it in digital form is the way to go, and I can’t think of a downside to that strategy.
Scapple print works well. Any diagramming tool would have the same problem.
The challenge is that your diagram is too big to fit legibly on one page. You can test this by making a copy of the diagram and modifying the copy to remove all but 200-300 words. This much smaller diagram should print legibly.
If you build a huge diagram, surprise surprise – it’s huge.
But you can break it up into a main diagram and smaller sub-diagrams in separate Scapple files, with links from notes in the main diagram to the sub-diagrams. Then the master could fit on a page and each sub-diagram also on a page.
Everything on one page is impossible. Stop trying.
That makes me think that Scapple is not the right tool for this job, then .
As you will have seen, the sheet/board which I asked for help with is a representation of characters and the relationships between them in a play.
At the front of the text, of course, there is a cast list which annotates the relationships between players… wife, murdered by, servant of etc.
Instead of constantly flipping back to those pages (often half a dozen in small type) from where I may be in the script when a new character appears, it’s convenient for me to have a visual layout (aka diagram) of who is who and how they relate.
At first I tried mind mapping software like MindNode. But that is aimed more at trees and hierarchical diagramming.
As I say, there may often be as few as a dozen characters. I can fit them in on my screen at up to 16 pt and with up to ( as Jim says) 200 words describing them. Scapple’s arrows and lines do the rest :-).
I’d hoped that Scapple could preserve the font size and relative dispositions on the page of all my notes - in fact reproducing what Screenshot does.
If your words were purely single spaced text (no shapes or lines), what font size would you need to use to print them on one page? For this diagram, you’ll need to use a smaller font than that, I think.
