Any printing tips for Multiple Monitors or default to Landscape?

[jmhuff-2]

Hello everyone,

I have upgraded to multiple monitors and its nice to expand the size of my workspace, but its not so cool on my printouts.

With only one 22-inch monitor the print workspace and printing a full sized chart looked great, but with two monitors its way small. I don't want to have to create another workspace or run a seperate instance just for printing if there is a trick.

I head of a lady that was having a "problem" because her print workspace was printing half the workspace on one sheet of paper, and the rest on a second sheet. This sounds like it could work for my problems.

Any ideas? Also, is there any way to get QCharts to save the printer setting of "Landscape"?

Thanks,
Matt

[Eye]

Matt,
This can be done. In fact you can save your pictures of your workspaces (trades) to a folder and review them quickly on your computer screen over four monitors.
I don't have time to go over every detail but it works something like this.
1. from the file menu "EXPORT" AN IMAGE of your workspace as a bit map file, perhaps with the equity and month of the trade in the file name.
2. Open the created file like you normally would.
3. Picture viewer or some similar program will open the file. Expand the window of the picture so that it fills all four monitors.
4. Go to the bottom of the picture display and hit the icon just to the left of the question mark. This will open the image with the Windows Paint program.
5. Again, open the window to fill all four monitors.
6. Go to the page set up option in the file menu OF THE PAINT PROGRAM ( not the file menu pictured in the picture). Here is where you need to experiment a little. Through appropriate choices, you can get this picture to print out in landscape orientation across two, three, or even four pieces of paper. You can even edit the image with the PAINT program to show just the charts, save that image and print it out without the quote sheets.
I used to get a nice 3 page print out of each trade. Now I save images of all my trades to a file in "my documents" and just review them on screen to see how often I make the same mistake over again!
Good luck,
Eye

[tradertom]

Matt,

I basically do what Eye spelled out but rather than save as a bitmap, I save as a jpeg export file. This gives me the option of saving a smaller file than a bitmap. When you save as a jpeg file, QCharts will pop up a box asking you what Quality you want. You can choose between low-quality/small files and high-quality/large files using a slider. I usually choose somewhere, maybe 2/3 the way (68 or so) in between the two extremes. QCharts remembers this quality setting between sessions, thankfully! (I wish QCharts would remember the landscape setting but it doesn't.)

Experiment with the smaller file/lower quality files. You will find that the lowest quality files are pretty grainy and blurry whereas the highest quality ones are clear. The file sizes of even the largest jpeg files are still smaller than bitmap files.

If you ever dabble in digital audio here is an analogy: the jpeg file is the image equivalent of an mp3 file in audio. You can save a file in any variety of quality settings. A bitmap file is the equivalent of a .WAV file in audio which generally has no settings and is not compressed. Jpeg is compressed and lossy so you do lose some definition, but you should be able to see your trade on it either way.

Good luck,
T