Printing Issues

Printing calendars can be hard. This topic explains a few of the problems related to printing and how they can be worked with.

The most common issue people encounter is trying to get the calendar to print entirely on one page. If you can't reduce the font-size any further and you're still having some problems, here are some tips:

• Change your page layout to Landscape. If you have a few wide events, this can make things fit better.
• Adjust the margins of your page. In FireFox and Internet Explorer, choose FILE | PAGE SETUP and reduce the margins.
• Use FireFox or Internet Explorer 7 for printing. They have the capability to shrink a page to fit. You can download FireFox for free from mozilla.com. You can download IE 7 from Microsoft.com.
• If you don't have events on weekends, set the option in the connectDaily configuration to hide Saturday and Sunday. The option is located in the SYSTEM | CONFIGURATION | APPEARANCE screen.
• The default style sheet makes the column widths of each day the same. If you have a few events that are very wide, all on the same day or days of the week, you can change the style sheet to let each day's column auto-size. To do this, remove the "width:" line from the style definition for TD.MHVCDayCell and TD.MHVCTodayCell.
• Adjust the printing style sheet used by connectDaily. You can change the font sizes used for printing by editing this file. The default print size for event titles is 6 points. This is a fairly small size and few people will want to make it smaller. The default print style sheet is css/print.css. You can specify a different one in the System Configuration Appearance screen.
• If the printout is for internal use, use a larger paper size like Legal or 11x17 tabloid size.

It is important to note that sometimes you just can't make things fit. Your only choice is to decrease your point size, or increase the paper size.

Example: A customer had events in their calendar where the title was 22 characters wide, and the event was present on each of 7 days. The number of characters present was 154 characters. Printing 154 characters in a page width of 7.5 inches requires a point size of 3.5pts. This is well below the ability of most people to read.

Special Notes about FireFox

FireFox has a feature to limit the minimum font size, with a default setting of 10pt. You can override this by Choosing TOOLS | OPTIONS from the menu. Select the option for Content. In the Fonts and Colors section, click on the Advanced button. Using the dropdown, set the "Minimum font size" to none.

Special Notes about Internet Explorer 6 and 7

By default, IE will not print background colors for events. If you are coloring your events, and you want to print them in color, here's what to do:

From the menu, choose TOOLS | INTERNET Options. Change to the Advanced tab and scroll down to the printing section. Check the option for "Print background colors and images".