Printing and Exporting as PDF

Any of our documentation web pages can be printed on paper or saved as a pdf file. To print you just use your browser's print function, after first setting the "Page Setup" options. You can then print directly to a printer, or you can export the page as a PDF file.

Use the printer button on the right side of the page menubar at the top of this page to get a printer friendly version of a page. You can then use your browser's print menu to print the page. If you choose a PDF print driver in the print dialog box you can convert the page to a pdf file.

Printing should be as easy as that, but if you have any problems, here are a few suggestions:

There's a bug in the print dialog box of many Windows applications, including Firefox. The bug is this: the scaling and margins of the Page Setup or Print Preview dialog boxes behave differently depending on which print driver was last used. Consequently, for them to work properly you must set the print driver you want by actually printing to it, then set the page setup options, then print to the same print driver again.

To reliably print and get the page sizes right, follow these procedures:

1. Set browser options: In your browser, for example in Firefox, make sure that you have checked the box Options→ Content→ Fonts & Colors→ Advanced→ Allow pages to choose their own fonts.
2. Set the printer driver: In your browser go to File→ Print, choose your printer, and print one page to the printer.

3. Choose the page setup options: In the browser's file menu, at File→ Page Setup or File→ Print Preview–>Page Setup you should set these options:

   • Check the Print Background (Colors & Images) box;
   • Set the scale to 100% or shrink to fit, and set the margins to 0.7" all around (don't worry, these settings will ultimately result in 1" margins);
   • Choose the title and date/time for the left and right sides of the header; and,
   • Choose page numbers for the center of the footer.
4. Print: Press the Print button. In Firefox there's a bug if fewer than all pages are chosen for printing that sometimes causes rendering problems.

Some browsers, in particular Google Chrome, allow you to print directly as a pdf file – you don't need a print driver installed.

For other browsers, if you have a pdf print driver installed on your computer, you can also create a pdf document from any page by using your browser to print as a pdf. If you don't have a pdf driver, you can easily install a free one, as described below.

1. Set browser options: In your browser, for example in Firefox, make sure that you have checked the box Options→ Content→ Fonts & Colors→ Advanced→ Allow pages to choose their own fonts.
2. Set the PDF print driver: In your browser go to File→ Print, choose Adobe PDF or another PDF print driver, and print one page to a dummy PDF file.

3. Choose the page setup options: In the browser's file menu, at File→ Page Setup or File→ Print Preview–>Page Setup you should set these options:

   • Check the Print Background (Colors & Images) box;
   • Set the scale and margins to 100% and 0.7" all around (don't worry, these settings will ultimately result in 1" margins);
   • Choose the title and date/time for the left and right sides of the header; and,
   • Choose page numbers for the center of the footer.
4. Print as a PDF file: Press the Print button to print the page as a PDF file.
5. Print the PDF file to paper:Open the PDF file in Adobe Reader if it doesn't open automatically. To print it, choose File→ Print and set the scale to Fit to Printable Area so that the page header and footer are printed. You can then print the file to a printer, or keep it for viewing as a PDF file.

• You can prevent the table of contents from being printed if you first close it in your browser by clicking on its Page Contents heading.
• Unfortunately, web pages are not paginated for printing, so a figure may be split across two printed pages. If you need a good printed copy of a figure, you can either,
  1. If possible, change the scale in the browser's print preview dialog box so that the printed document is repaginated so that the figure no longer splits; or,
  2. Click on the figure to open it in its own window; then you can print it separately from the rest of the web page.

If you use any of the commercial Adobe products, or if you have Microsoft Office installed, you probably already have a PDF print driver installed. To find out if you have one, under Microsoft Windows XP go to Start→ Settings→ Printers and Faxes and see if a PDF printer driver is included with other printers. If not, I suggest you install one of the following:

• PDF Creator, an open source PDF printer driver available here. It's quite useful – it will enable you to print any document in any application as a pdf file. (Note: To prevent its inserting a troublesome add-in to your browser, when installing it make sure you uncheck the yahoo toobar option, and on the next page uncheck the browser add-in box.)
• CutePDF, a lightweight print driver that many people like.

• If you print only selected pages, some code blocks on pages may overlap their prior paragraphs, even though everything looks fine in Firefox's print preview. If you print all pages there is no problem. That's how Firefox v3 behaves; other browsers may behave differently.