Printing Details

Printing Details for “Ads & Flyers” Thumbnail Array and for “Photos & Features”

Almost every ePromenader section can be printed without any special steps, by simply “hitting the Print button” in your browser, just as you would for any other web page or document.

This page covers the two ePromenader sections that do not always print in the best-looking format from a simple print command.

These sections are the “Ads & Flyers” thumbnail array section and the “Photos & Features” section. Both of these sections give better-looking hard copy in some browsers when print scaling is adjusted away from default values. The hard copy layout for these two sections will be more pleasing (and use less paper) if you use your browser’s “print dialog” or “Print Preview” options to adjust the “Scale” (and in some cases the orientation) of your print output.

Each browser has its own particularities in displaying and printing web content. The following “recipes” give steps needed for scaling printouts to get the best results when printing these two sections from four specific setups.

If you don’t find your specific setup here, then maybe one of these will be close enough that you can adapt it for your setup. If that doesn’t work, ask a friend for help or contact us at promenader@rochester.rr.com and tell us what Internet device and browser you are using. We will do our best to find the answer.

If you find better settings that given here, please contact us also so we can add your feedback to our knowledge base.

In our opinion the best print format for the Ads & Flyers thumbnail set is a 2x2 (four-to-a-page) array in “portrait” orientation, and the best format for Photos & Features is with two columns per page, also in portrait orientation.

To get these results we have found that on a Windows PC Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox browsers give the best results, while on a Mac the Mozilla Firefox browser gives the best results. The Safari browser on a Mac gives useable hard copy but not as pleasing as the others.

• Microsoft Internet Explorer on a Windows PC: Adjust the print scale as follows…
  • First, locate and choose the “Print Preview” option,
  • Then, in the resulting dialog box, locate and choose the “Scale” menu. (It might show “Shrink To Fit” or it might already show a default % value.)
  • Experiment with values until you like what you see in the preview window. Lower scale values make the print smaller, but fit more images on the page.
  • For printing the entire Flyer Thumbnail array at 4 per page, try 70%
  • For printing the Photos & Features section the result depends on where pictures fall. If Shrink-To-Fit doesn’t look right try 90%
• Mozilla Firefox on a Windows PC:
  • Locate “Print Preview” (either in File/PrintPreview or in Menu/Print, depending on your setup).
  • Set the Scale for a good-looking preview (Try 80% for Thumbnails or 90% for Features.)
• Mozilla Firefox on a Mac:
  • On a Mac, before trying to print from Firefox, pull down the File Menu and choose “Page Setup.”
  • There’s no preview to let you zero in on a good scale factor, but try mine and see what you get. (Only print two pages at first, so as not to waste paper on settings that don’t work for you.)
  • For printing the entire Flyer Thumbnail array at 4 per page, try 80%
  • For printing the Photos & Features section, try 90%
• Apple Safari on a Mac (not recommended if you have any other option):
  • Printing the Flyer Thumbnail Array or Photos & Features from Safari gives disappointing results.
  • The thumbnails come out in a single column unless you choose “Landscape” orientation.
  • The Photos & Features section comes out in a single column no matter what you choose. (Anyone finding better print settings for Safari . . . please contact us so we can post them here.)

Remember that these adjustments are only needed for printing the best-looking hard copy for two ePromenader sections: Photos & Features and the thumbnail array on the Ads & Flyers page. All other ePromenader sections and all Federation pages print just fine with default print settings.