BUG: A3 Portrait Printing prints as A4 portrait in left-side of A3 Sheet

Question

yEd version: v3.19

I sent a graph from yed to the printer as:

• A3, portrait, centred, view area

The print preview showed me the correct A3 Portrait rendering.

When it printed, the diagram was A4 portrait sized occupying the left-hand side of the ouptut A3 sheet.  Half the sheet of paper was wasted (blank).  The diagram itself was consquently smaller by the ratio of A3 --> A4.

Of cours that also consumed extra time to troubleshoot the problem.  Several attempts wre conducted to ensure the correct settings were selected.  No success there.

As a workaround we printed to a file.  The file print produces a PS (PostScript) file.  We prefer to see a PDF for file output here.

The postscript file didn't print display or print correctly as it was.  Eventually was able to print using the Okular program.

Work-around...

1. Print the diagram/graph to a file (PostScript, is output)
2. Start-up the Okular viewing program
3. Select the "Import PostScript as PDF" from the File menu.
4. Display the Okular PrintPreview dialogue and check the rendered output.
5. If everything is good (as it was for me), then send file to the A3 printer.
6. Collect your output!

Success.

Answer 1

Thank you very much for your feedback.

Unfortunately, we do not have printers that support A3 paper size so we cannot test printing to A3. However, printing problems are almost always related to how well Java supports a specific printer model. In other words, even if we had an A3 printer, we would probably not be able to reproduce the problem unless we had the exact same printer model. :-(

I actuall do not think that printing to A3 does not work in general, because we have received feedback from other yEd users that were able to successfully print to A3 in the past.

That said, in Java versions 9, 10, 11, and 12 printing does not work as well as in the old version 8. So, if you are running yEd on one of the newer Java versions (you can check in "Help" -> "About"), running yEd on Java 8 might actually help with printing. A yEd installer with embedded Java 8 is available from the yEd download page.

Finally I would like to mention that

1. the file format that is produced when you "print to file" depends on your printer driver and your operating system. This is not something determined by yEd at all.
2. you can directly export diagrams to PDF through "File" -> "Export" by choosing the PDF format in the "Files of Type" dropdown list of the export file chooser dialog. No need to "print to file" for that.