Print To Scale help page

Main window

The app starts with an empty window. You can either drag and drop an image to the window or use the File->Open menu item to open an image and create a new layout.

Once the image is loaded the window will show a preview of the layout, initially consisting of a single page.

Scale setup entry in the middle of the window toolbar works together with the scale arrow on the layout. To setup scale drag the arrow to indicate the image feature which size will be used to scale the whole image. Then enter the desired arrow size on print out in the Scale Setup toolbar entry. The length can be specified in millimeters, centimeters and inches. The layout will be recalculated immediately to reflect the change in scale.

Zoom buttons allow to zoom the layout preview as needed. Sometimes it is usefull to magnify the preview to the individual pixels level so the scale arrow head can be accurately positioned.

Selection button turns the layout area selection on and off. The selection is shown as a “marching ants” rectangle that can be resized by its sides and corners and also can be dragged by its center around. With the selection feature you can:

Print only selected pages in layout. To print specific pages select a region with the required pages. The selected for printing pages are highlighted. To return to printing all pages turn the selection off or select the whole image with Cmd-A shortcut.
Use only part of the image for the layout. Turn on the selection, select the required part of the image, then use the menu Edit->Crop. At any time you can select Edit->Reset Crop to use the whole image again. Note that the original image on disk is not affected by cropping or in any other way by the app.

The Page setup, Layout setup, Ink saver and Print call additional dialogs described below.

Page setup

Page setup is a standard macOS panel for paper size, orientation and paper printable area configuration.

Format For: the field defines non printable area page margins. Usually selecting your printer gives optimal results.
Paper Size: Select the paper size. Also this popup has “Manage custom sizes…” entry which can be used to setup custom page size or custom page margins.
Orientation: Portrait or landscape orientation. Some layouts may require less pages in landscape orientation than in portrait.
Scale: leave it at 100%.

Once the page setup is finished the layout will be recalculated with new page parameters.

Layout Setup

Layout setup panel is a central place for all layout configuration options.

Layout: the section shows how many pages the layout consists of. You can override the automatically calculated values by checking Manually enter number of pages in layout button and entering the required number of pages.
Image position: the image can be centered in the layout or placed at its top left corner.
Page overlap: an additional overlap between pages can be specified in this section. This option is useful if the standard non-printable margins are too small for gluing. Fill with image content check box specifies whether the overlap is filled with image content or left blank.
Alignment grid: A continuous grid can be overlaid over the layout to help properly align sheets of paper. Show grid check enables the grid, Show grid diagonals enables a corresponding diagonal grid. Custom grid size entry allows to set the horizontal/vertical grid size.
Scale arrow: When show scale arrow on print is checked the scale arrow is shown on print.

Ink saver

Ink saver feature is primarily useful for non photographic images like schemes, drawings, patterns etc. with large solid color areas unimportant for the layout purpose but consume a lot of ink when printed. It works by lightening the image, but also has an option to preserve edge features so that the contours of solid color areas are better visible on print.

Ink saver: in this section you can enable ink saver feature and set amount of lightening applied.
Edges: Enable or disable edge preservation feature. Also with radius slider you can alter the distance from the edges the lightening effect is applied without edge preservation. The smaller the radius the closer to the edge the lightening is applied.

Print

Print is a standard macOS printing panel. It allows to preview the pages to be printed and also to save the print out to pdf. For Print To Scale it is important that all the settings in print panel affecting page geometry (like Pages per Sheet, Reverse page orientation, Flip horizontally, scaling etc.) are turned off.