10 Printing

The end result of most of your work with Fireworkz will be a printed document. It is therefore worth spending some time exploring the various printing options available, and making sure that your computer and printer are set up to get the best possible results.

This chapter describes:

Before printing

Before trying to print, ensure that your printer is correctly set up, loaded with paper and cartridge or ribbon, and is switched on and set on-line.

Fireworkz uses the standard RISC OS or Windows printer drivers for printing. You should make sure that you have loaded the printer driver that you want to use. If you have more than one printer driver installed make sure that you have selected the one that you want to use.

You should also make sure that your printer driver is correctly configured. To do this:

Printing

Choosing to print

Print tool button Once you are ready to print, display the Print dialogue box by clicking on the Print tool button on the toolbar (or by choosing Print from the File menu).

The Print dialogue box is where you make important choices about your printing job, such as how many copies of the document you want to print, or what selection of pages from the document you want to print.

Basic printing options

When you choose Print from a menu or the toolbar, the basic Print dialogue box will appear. It will show you the type of printer driver you have loaded (e.g. PostScript): on RISC OS this will be shown at the top of the dialogue box, whereas on Windows this will be shown in the title bar.

  1. Enter the number of copies of your document that you want to print.
  2. If you only want to print some of the pages in your document, select the Range radio button. You will then be able to type in the number of the page you want to start printing from, and the number of the last page in the range you want to print. The basic Print dialogue box allows you to select pages going down the document (Y - where one is the topmost page) and pages going across the document (X - where one is the leftmost page). If the Range radio button is not selected, the Range options will be greyed out.
  3. Click Print to print.

Additional printing options

Several extra options are available for more advanced printing requirements. To access them, click the Extra button in the Print dialogue box. A larger dialogue box containing a wider range of options will appear.

Range of pages

You will see that the range numbers in the large Print dialogue box dialogue box run from 1.1 onwards. This is because Fireworkz can handle documents which are more than one page wide, such as large tables.

Page number x.y means the x-th page across and the y-th page down. Normally you will only have one page across and so the first number will always be one. In this case you can miss out the 1. when editing range information.

You can specify a list, a range or a combination of the two.

Examples:

2 4 7 Prints pages 2, 4 and 7
1 3-5 8 Prints pages 1, 3, 4, 5 and 8
2.1-2.7 Prints the first seven pages of the second column
B 1 Prints a blank page and then the first page (pamphlet printing)

Your list can be several lines long. To add more lines press Ctrl-Return↵.

Pamphlet printing

The pamphlet printing option enables you to print documents which will be folded and stapled to produce an A5 pamphlet. For example in an eight page document page one will be printed next to page eight, page two next to page seven, and so on.

To switch on pamphlet printing, click the Pamphlet button. You will see that the Two up option button has been switched on as well, and that the Range list box contains a list of pages showing you the pairs of pages that will appear on each printed page. B means a blank page.

Pamphlet printing assumes that you have a duplex printer, i.e. one which automatically feeds the pages back through to print on the reverse side. If this is not the case:

  1. Delete every alternate line (representing a pair of pages) from the Range list box, by selecting the entries and pressing Delete.
  2. Print the remaining pages.
  3. Reload the paper into the printer the correct way round.
  4. Choose Pamphlet printing again and delete the pages you have already printed.
  5. If necessary, switch on Reverse printing as well. The aim is to get page two to appear on the back of page one. You may need to experiment to get your pages in the right order and the correct orientation.

Sides

Click on:

The first page in a document is always an odd page.

Reverse

This option prints pages in reverse order, i.e. last page first.

Collated

If you are printing more than one copy of a document this option will collate them so that the pages appear as complete documents rather than all the page ones then all the page twos. However it can add considerably to printing time, as some printers, particularly laser printers, can print multiple copies of a single page much more quickly than a single copy of several different pages.

Two up

This option prints two reduced size pages side-by-side on an A4 page. This will be page 1 and page 2 of the document, and subsequent pairs of pages.

Print scale

This option lets you set the size of your printed output in terms of a percentage of the actual size of the document (i.e. you can print reduced or enlarged document content), or so that the printed output will fit on the selected size of paper. To set this:

  1. Choose Scale from the Page menu. The Print scale dialogue box will be displayed.
  2. Select the options required from the Print scale dialogue box.
  3. Click Apply.
  4. Until you change this setting, this is how the current document will be printed.

Printing labels

Fireworkz includes special facilities to make it easy for you to print labels. To do this you will need your name and address list stored as a CSV, Fireworkz or other data file.

  1. Open a new document based on a label template.
  2. RISC OS: Drop the CSV file icon on to this document.
  3. Windows: Choose Insert File from the File menu.
  4. You will see a dialogue box asking you whether you want to load the file as labels or as text. Select Labels and specify how many columns across the labels should be.
  5. Click Insert.
    Fireworkz will create sheets of labels for you in this document.
  6. You may wish to fine-tune the label sheets before printing them. The top, left and bottom paper margins may need resetting to match your label sheets. You may want to reduce the type size if some of the addresses are too long to fit on a label.
  7. You should expect to have to experiment with the paper definition and the other settings by printing out a page or two till you succeed in printing out a page of perfect labels.
  8. The label style has the grid switched on to help you with your fine-tuning. When you are happy with the format you should switch this off.
  9. Print tool button Click the Print tool button on the toolbar. Once you have got your page and labels set up correctly, you may wish to save the document as a template for future use.

Solving printing problems

While printing is usually as simple as clicking on the Print toolbar button, there are times when problems occur. Most of these are due to a failure of communication between your printer and the OS printer drivers, or to incorrect information being used by one of them.

Nothing happens when I try to print

Check the following things:

Before concluding that the problem lies with Fireworkz, see if it is possible to print from another program.

Edges of the page are missing, although the rest prints normally

This problem is usually caused by trying to print on a larger area of the paper than the printer is physically capable of printing on. Many types of printers are not able to print edge-to-edge on a sheet of paper, so if your page design has not taken this into account your document can often not be printed as intended.

The problem is usually caused by a slight mismatch between your printer driver and printer.

With PostScript laser printers, the standard PostScript printer driver leaves a small margin around the edge of pages. If you are still losing information from the edge of your pages, you will have to ensure that you leave sufficient margins for your printer to cope.

If you are using a direct drive laser printer, such as ArcLaser or LaserDirect, make sure that you are using the printer drivers supplied with it and not the standard Acorn one.

The printer produces blank pages between each page of my document

One or more blank pages inserted between each page of the document usually indicates that Fireworkz or the printer driver are using a page length which is too long.