PRINTING PICTURES OF YOUR GRAPHS

To print, select Print from the File menu (or the printer icon in the toolbar). This will bring up the standard Print dialog box with a few options that are specific to Graphmatica. You can select a different printer or change the properties of the current printer in the standard way (select a printer from the droplist or click the Properties button). (select a printer and/or presets from the droplists).

You can also control the following options. (To find these options, first expand the Print dialog to its full size using the down- arrow button to the right of the Printer selection, then ensure "Graphmatica" is selected in the popup menu in the middle of the screen.) Your selections will be remembered the next time you print, and will be saved permanently in your graphmat.ini file when your settings are saved after printing.

Draw graphs with wide lines

If you have trouble distinguishing between graphs and other markings on the grid on the printout, you may want to mark this checkbox. This increases the width of the "pen" used to draw graphs from one pixel to two. If you have selected wide lines in the Options Panel, this checkbox is set by default.

Print equation list

Check this box to print the list of equations on the grid below the graph. Checked by default.

color-coded

Check this box to print each equation in the same color as its corresponding graph. This setting is ignored if you do not check "Print equation list" or do not print to a color printer.

Print point tables

Check this box to print the table of points calculated for each equation, or the points you entered for each data plot. You must also select "Print equation list" to use this feature. Keep in mind that depending on your selected interval between calculated points, the point tables for a screen full of graphs may end up being quite voluminous. You can reduce the space required by specifying a larger interval in between points or reducing the size of the Point tables font in the Graph Paper dialog box. Points for Cartesian functions of the same variable may be combined in a single table for a more compact presentation, but points for other types of graphs always get their own table. You may want to do a test print with just a few equations before printing a full screen of graphs using this option to avoid wasting paper and ink.

Graphmatica recalculates the graphs at your printer's native resolution to produce high-quality output. Note that when automatic gridline or legends spacing is selected, the increased resolution may result in a smaller interval between gridlines or legends (and hence the point tables interval when it is set to be the same as one of these) than is used on screen. If a getting printouts that use a specific interval is important to you, either specify the interval manually in the Legends tab of the Graph Paper dialog box, or copy the graphs as a vector image to your preferred word processor and print from there.

PAGE SETUP

By default, Graphmatica leaves half-inch margins on all four sides of the page, but the Page Setup menu item allows you to set your own margins. To edit the margins, make sure "Graphmatica" is selected in the "Settings" popup menu. The standard Page Setup dialog box also lets you select the paper size and orientation.

The margins you select will be recorded in the .gr file if you save your graph document after printing. Also, when you Save Setup Info after printing, the default margins will be set to those in the current document.

NOTES

1. You can make the grid lines and axes bolder for high-resolution printing by setting the gridlinewidth parameter in graphmat.ini manually to something higher than the default value of 1. See Editing Graph Documents and graphmat.ini for details on doing this.
2. The grid in your printout may not look exactly like what is shown on the screen. Although it will have the same dimensions, the grid markings and the legends along the axes may be placed at smaller intervals due to the increased resolution.
3. In Draft mode, it may look like the graphs are being drawn with wide lines even if you did not select this option. This is due to the fact that when the graphs are scaled up, the lines get thicker as well. There is not much I can do about this.
4. Many printers do not support scaling styled lines. This means that in draft mode, strict inequalities may print as solid lines instead of dashed.
5. While you are printing in Proof Quality, Graphmatica gives you progress reports on which equation it is graphing using the status line.
6. If you are unable to print or unsatisfied with the print quality, you can always print indirectly by doing the following: copy a bitmap or vector image to the clipboard using one of the Copy Graphs options in the Edit menu, then paste the image into your paint program or word processor and print from there. Tip: when copying as a raster image, the larger the Graphmatica window, the better this process will turn out. See Edit menu options for details.