Printing a Diagram

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  Hi Sonrisante,
  
  
  Thanks for the feedback. Glad you like the diagram. In the end we decided not to include a print option because of time constraints on the project, however you can either copy and paste the diagram into a tool of your choice (as long as it supports the Windows extended metafile format), or simply export it as a PNG using File > Export. You can then print from your paint or drawing package.
  
  The diagram is copied/exported at the zoom level you currently see, so if you want any detail you'll need to be zoomed in far enough to see it. The Copy functionality allows you to copy (i) the entire diagram, (ii) the visible region, or (iii) just the selected objects, so it's fairly flexible. One word of caution is that due to the limitations of EMF to PNG conversion support in Windows, if your diagram is particularly large, SQL Dependency Tracker may need to zoom out some way in order to export it as a PNG. However, this limitation does not apply to the EMF format itself so you can copy and paste at full zoom into any tool that supports it.
  
  Hope that gets you what you're after.
  
  
  Many thanks,

  Bart Read March 28, 2006 13:00

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  I'll try it out; this sounds like it will work for me. Glad to see you're supporting WMF, and not just bitmap.

  sonrisante March 28, 2006 16:28

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  Hi Sonrisante,
  
  
  Yes, EMF is a very good thing in this case since it's a much more compact format. Initially we were just using bitmaps, due to having some issues with Metafile support in .NET (I'll get round to blogging about this when I've got some time as I think it might be quite useful for a lot of people), but you can imagine the trouble we ran into I'm sure.
  
  Annoyingly enough it's just not possible to save an arbitrarily large PNG image with .NET because you'll run out of memory if you try to allocate a very large image. Now I say annoyingly enough, but that's not really fair on .NET, because the number of situations in which you're going to want to do that kind of thing is fairly limited. However, if you do want to save an image that's 20000 pixels by 20000 pixels as a PNG, the only way you're going to be able to do it is to write a .NET wrapper around libpng and write the image out chunk by chunk yourself... no mean feat, and obviously we haven't had time to do this. And in any case, have you ever tried to open a 10MB, or larger, PNG in a paint package? Takes forever. Hence EMF to the rescue.
  
  There may be the odd tweak to the final release, but it'll basically work as it does now.
  
  Thanks again for the feedback.
  
  
  Cheers,
  Bart

  Bart Read March 29, 2006 05:11

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  I copied EMF and pasted into Excel. The great thing about Excel is that it's a terrific WMF/EMF container. Word tries to cram it into a page, Visio does something strange with it, but Excel will let you expand, shrink, whatever, even to a HUGE size that would never fit on paper, and lets you then print to whatever printers you have setup (including FedEx Kinko's super-sized posters for mounting on my wall).

  sonrisante March 29, 2006 20:22

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  Ah, now that's a great tip. I imagine most of our users will have Excel, or some similar spreadsheet program -- I imagine this would also work with the OpenOffice.org spreadsheet -- so that's great to know. I'd noticed the same thing with Word, and then of course if you zoom in far enough to see anything the repaint performance is truly appalling when scrolling horizontally, although oddly vertical scrolling seems to clip the painting more sensibly.
  
  
  Cheers,

  Bart Read March 30, 2006 04:49

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  It might be an idea to add WMF explicitly to the export option. Is there a way to disable the background pattern? If not, it ought to be an option to omit it from WMF export.
  
  /Bard

  Baard March 31, 2006 11:19

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  Hi Baard,
  
  
  Thanks for your feedback. The background pattern has been disabled: the fact that it's on in the beta is a bug. We've no plans to provide an option to make this toggleable though. We are also considering adding EMF export for images since of course it scales much better, however given the amount of work we've still left to do I unfortunately can't make any promises at this point. Of course, if you recruited lots of people to say you want to be able to do this... (but I didn't say that ).
  
  
  Thanks,

  Bart Read March 31, 2006 11:23

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