I’ve done a search and found an exchange from March, 2005, about a year ago, where somone complains about no margins and other lack of control when printing plain text and rich text notes. From what I read in that exchange (I had searched under printing AND problem) this was a weak point in DevonThink and was expected to be improved when DevonThink Pro came out.
I guess it wasn’t. I’m using DTPro and also don’t seem to have any control over margins in my notes. But even worse, when I print the text is so small I can barely read it, although I have 14 pt set for both doc types in preferences.
So I’m wondering if anything about doc control has changed and whether the printed font size problem is related or something different. (I have that same printed font size problem with TextEdit).
If you open a document in its own window and set the window width to about 6 inches or so, you can get reasonably sized margins and a larger printed font. This is the same print performance as TextEdit in the Wrap to Window display.
Finally got around to trying this and it really didn’t help at all as far as the margins were concerned. And in order to get it to look like a font size of 12 to 14, I had the onscreen text at 18!!
This is really sad. With all the fantastic things that DTPro does, that it can’t handle text well for printing is just so hard to believe.
Sigh…
I hope someone can prove me wrong or blind or dumb.
Open the document in its own widow and set the text width to about 6 inches (use the Ruler). Try setting the font to 12, View > Actual Size. Set File > Printer Setup for Portrait and for Letter or A4 (whichever you use). Now Print the document. Works for me.
For well laid out printer output (or for creating nicely formatted Word or PDF output) I copy/paste DT Pro RTF/RTFD documents into Apples Pages application. Here I can add header and footer, footnotes, etc. If you need to share documents with Word-using colleagues, Pages is much easier to work with than MS Word itself, especially if the document includes images. Pages and its Word export retain the hyperlinks and bookmark links of your RTF/RTFD material from DT Pro and images fall into place with little or no tweaking.
Thanks for the step by step instructions, Bill. This is one of the very rare times that what you suggested simply didn’t work for me. I followed your steps exactly but the printed copy was the same as always: font size so small that it’s an effort to read, really looks miniscule.
I understand what you’re saying about cutting and pasting, but the printing I was to do with DTP is just of lists of stuff for my own use with almost no formatting, so it’s not worth typing it into DT and then putting it into another editor.
Thanks, Bill. Actually, after I sent off the last email, I tried your suggestions yet again and this time it worked, that is, the font size looked as it should when printed. The only difference I can think of is that the first time I tried it the document was already open and had some text in it. The second time was with a new document. Maybe there is a difference?
And thanks for the tip about wrap to page in TextEdit.
Now I just need one more thing to make me a really happy kid. If I work on one document where I’ve changed the margins, something that need to be done, the next rtf document I open has the margins set back at the default and I have to change them again. I can’t find anywhere to get these changes to “stick.”
This is one of my biggest gripes in DEVONthink PE/Pro. It should be using the actual font size instead of the screen font size. A document printed in a high res monitor looks different when it’s printed on another machine that uses a lower res monitor. The point of zooming is to be able to view the document at prefered size while keeping the font size intact. Otherwise there’s no point of having screen zooming and font scaling together.
Other than copying the ruler (cmd-1) and pasting it (cmd-2), I don’t see any other way to do it. I tried overriding the “Default” style (cmd-ctrl-t and add the new one to favorite while preserving the ruler) but it wouldn’t work.
I’ve just run into this problem with DT Pro and frankly I’m taken aback at the way DT handles printing. I know of no other application (and I’ve used many) where the size of the window on screen affects the size at which a document is printed and where the margins equally seem to be a moveable feast. Thankfully I generally don’t print from DT. Really think this issue should be addressed.
Ruler width should determine page breaks.
Fonts size should be respected when printed.
This is a big issue that should be addressed as soon as pocssible. Thanks
PS There is another bug: any time you open a richtext from the database in textedit the page setup is always set to us letter even if you have decided that the default page attributes is A4 (in textedit and in Devon)
Believe it or not, just now was the first occassion I had to print text / rtf from DTP. I also encountered left margins cut off. Now I am following Bill’s suggestion to adjust margins in a new window. But eventually I think DTP should be able to automatically adjust margins so that they do not cut off when printing with a text / rtf item selected. I hope this can be addressed.
Indeed, there are times where I want simply to print a file from DT Pro without exporting and reformatting, but without the ability to do simple editing of margins, etc., it’s vey impractical. I have transcriptions of correspondence, for example, where I would like just to print a single letter quickly.
Regarding the other topic in this thread, it would be nice also to have a true default font/style that when changed in preferences, was immediately applied to all files in the default format (like my email program does to all messages). As it works now, I cannot change a default format without changing every RTF file individually.
