Request for help for printing large maps, please

Tinderbox Tasks
1

Good afternoon, I am writing to ask for some help and advice please. I am trying to print a large TB map that looks like a complex mind map. To give some idea of the size, on my 13" MacBook screen to still be able to read the note titles, I can only see about an eighth of it at a time.

I want to be able to print the whole map to an A1 or A2 poster and to do this I assume I need to export to pdf first. I have tried “print to pdf” and although I can print the whole map, when I enlarge it no titles are visible. I have also tried “copy view as image” and that seems to work but only the link lines in the actual screen view are shown in the image. Snagit seems to work but when enlarged the text becomes too fuzzy to read.

Any advice would be appreciated. Many thanks in advance.
Tony

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I think the intended method for this is ‘copy view as image’, which will copy all of the map, including bits off screen. The data is in vector form so if you make a new document from the clipboard in PDF you should have a nicely scaling PDF.

However, in testing, the above method does take an image at the current zoom level (i.e. possibly missing some labels, etc.). I suggest you set your map zoom to normal and then ‘copy view as image’. From my tests here, albeit with different data, this should work.

TIL that the copy image method exports the whole map as rendered at the current zoom level and not at standard zoom as I’d hitherto assumed.

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Hello Mark, thanks for your quick response. Following your advice I now have an excellent scalable PDF of my map. The only thing is that is still does not include all the link lines. I thought about this and realised of course, that the primary purpose of the links really is to aid more detailed analysis of the data and not for export to an image. I have therefore changed my approach and grouped my ideas into shaded composites and the result is much more effective. Once again many thanks, Tony

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Links don’t appear in very large images, because macOS can’t draw directly onto very large canvasses. We’re working on a different approach.

5

I had what I think is a similar problem some months ago and received a very helpful suggestion to use Snag-it. It worked beautifully. Here’s the thread.

1 Like
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Hello Lew, I am sorry for my slow response. Thank you for your advice; I have now installed Snagit and it works well. 'Much appreciated, Tony

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Not at all. Glad it worked.