Printing a large diagram onto A2 paper or above?

[Mike Dorey]

Hi there

Has anyone had experience of printing a big EA diagram onto paper larger than A3?  Part of my organisation has an HP DesignJet 500 printer which can print onto many sizes such as 'ISO A1 - 594 x 841 mm', But EA doesnt seem to allow you to specify this size.  My understanding is that the page size for an EA diagram is dictated by the Page Size/Printer settings you have assigned to it?   In my case, selecting 'ISO A1 - 594 x 841 mm' through the diagram properties (Page Setup -> Advanced) causes the diagram to revert to a blank setting or back to something like A4 or A3.

Any ideas how to work round this?  Or is there another way of printing a large diagram?    Thanks
  

[«Midnight»]

Hi Mike,

I was able to get EA to print on a large plotter - something like E5 I think - with a bit of work.

What I did find was that EA page sizes were very fragile. It seems that settings for the Windows default printer, the EA default printer, and the individual EA project all affect the page size. Some of these seem to overwrite the others if they are 'touched' in any way. That might be something as simple as viewing a dialog that includes printer setting, even if the dialog is canceled without any changes.

I was not able to isolate the problem but I did report it to Sparx. I was experiencing these issues across a major version change - from before the beta started until after the product was released - so that there were all kinds of changes going on at Sparx. For all I know the problem might have been partially resolved, but it has certainly not cleared up completely. Or perhaps the documentation has not caught up.

In any case, here's what I learned.

Make sure the appropriate printer drivers are installed on your local machine, even if the printer is a network resource.

Make sure you can set the Windows default printer to the target printer, and print a large-format page from Windows. AFAIK the printer does not need to be your default, but it is important to establish that Windows can see and use the printer.

Open the EA diagrams that you are going to print.

Make sure that immediately before you print large pages, you set the EA default printer to your target, and set the page size in EA to the large format.

Make sure you open the diagram properties and set the page sizes - I don't have EA open, so I don't have the exact sequence at hand - to the printer and paper size you want.

Try printing immediately, before you do anything else in EA. You might have to fiddle with the above sequence a bit, but you should eventually get the correct results. Once you've got the first diagram worked out you should be able to print several more.

Note that you might have to go through the whole process (except for the Windows setup parts) next time you need to print a diagram. EA really likes to reset things to the Windows default printer.

HTH, David