Tuesday, April 29, 2008

New Print Preview Tool

Printing on WriteMaps has always been more difficult than I'd like it to be. Some browsers helpfully tile a large sitemap across several printed pages while others simply print a crop of the top left portion of the map. Since the majority of browsers seem to do the latter, I've received numerous messages requesting better print control and I've been working hard at figuring out a good solution. Tonight I added a new print preview feature to the application to give users more control over their print output. You can get to this preview screen by selecting "Print" in the WriteMaps toolbar File menu, as shown:

Clicking print will bring you to the new print preview interface. A dotted red box represents your paper size and you can adjust its dimensions using the text inputs at the top of the page. This will give you a good idea of how much of your sitemap will fit on your printed page. This tool becomes particularly useful for printing large sitemaps, because you can drag and zoom your sitemap around to bring different sections of your sitemap into the printable area. This allows you to make printed tiles of your map which can be pieced together after printing. Here's what the print preview looks like:

I hope this helps everyone out! Feel free to leave a comment and let me know how you like it. Also, as always, if you notice any buggy behavior, please use the feedback form to report it so it can be taken care of right away. Thanks!

Developer Footnote

Many of the features such as zooming, dragging, and page sorting are all made much more possible due to the incredible jQuery UI library. It's really surprising how quickly I can now go from concept to production with features that would have taken weeks or months to develop in the past. I should admit as a disclosure that I'm a member of the jQuery design team, but I certainly have no part in the magic that is jQuery and jQuery UI. So that said, keep it up guys, you're making the jobs of designers like me a whole lot more enjoyable!

Posted by Scott on 04/29 at 04:15 AM