Exporting and Printing

The final section of this tutorial covers most of the ways of getting your finished charts out of GraPL and into your reports, web pages or picture collection. The most obvious route is through the Windows clipboard, and the ‘Windows Metafile’ format is used here to make sure that the charts can be scaled well once pasted into Word or any other word-processor.

Using the Windows clipboard

To test this method, simply start your favourite word-processor and open a new document. Click on the chart preview (the small thumbnail will do) and hit Ctrl+C or use Edit,Copy from the menu. Now switch to your word-processor and paste in the chart. It will be scaled to the same size as the chart Frame (by default 6” by 4.5” which is a good fit to standard paper) but you can stretch it to fit the space available.

There are two ‘Preference’ settings which you can use here to customise the way your chart is copied:

• Copy charts to Clipboard in greyscale
• Show edge of paper when clipboarding

Normally you would leave these to default (use colour, show paper) but if you are producing a report which you know will be printed on a monochrome printer, it is much better to have GraPL copy the charts already greyscaled, as the final output from Word will be much smarter.

Saving as a Webpage

GraPL offers you three possibilities here, depending on the browser you want to use and how you want to include the charts in your completed web site.

• Use File,Export chart,Webpage (or press the ‘Export as Webpage’ tool button) to save a single HTML file with the chart included in-line as a vector graphic using VML commands. This is by far the most effective (and smallest) format but is currently only supported by IE5 and above. It is the default format used by all the Office-2000 tools when saving graphic information such as WordArt.
• Use File,Export chart, Save as PNG image to make a ‘portable network graphic’ image file from your chart. This can be referenced from your own HTML page in the normal way using an image tag.
• Use File,Export chart,Webpage with Image to save a PNG file (as above) and a companion HTML file which includes a link to it.

All the above will show you a simple dialogue to let you customise the settings and type in the file-name. The folder you choose will be remembered for next time, separately for each file type. This is to allow you to keep your web-pages separate from your image files without re-typing the path every time. You might also like to try exporting your data-sheet as a web-page – this is a very quick way of taking tabular data and generating a simple HTML table from it.

Notice that you can also choose to scale the image here – use a scale of around 0.4 to make a very effective thumbnail for web-site use. Both charts and tables will be exported with any notes added at the end as simple paragraph text. If you know you are preparing a chart for publication as a web-page you can, of course, use simple HTML tags like <b> or <i> in the notes to get bold and italic emphasis.

Saving files for use by DTP programs

There are two further export options you may like to try, both suitable for high-end publishing tools such as Adobe PageMaker.

• Export as Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) is the best quality format possible. It is what you should use if you are preparing material for publication by a professional printer. You can include EPS graphics in Word documents, and they will print correctly if you have a PostScript printer (such as the Tektronix 840) available to you. However all you will see in the document is an outline, with a few notes telling you the title of the chart and the date and time you exported the file.
• Export as raw PostScript is the correct format to use if you want to publish your charts in Adobe’s Portable Document Format using the Acrobat distiller. Simply save the charts into the Acrobat ‘inbound’ folder and it will do the rest.

Finally, you can choose to export the chart as a Windows metafile, which you could include in Word, or insert into any simple drawing tool (PowerPoint can handle these quite well) to add all sorts of special effects, extra notes and so on.

Printing your Charts and Data

You can print any chart or datasheet in the obvious way – make sure the appropriate tab is at the front and press the ‘Print’ or ‘Print Preview’ tool buttons. You can also use File,Print from the main menu to bring up the standard Windows ‘choose printer’ dialogue if you want your charts sent to a special destination (such as a colour printer).

You can also set up a collection of charts and data to be printed as a single run using the File,Overview dialogue:

In the example, I have chosen to print the notes I made in the File,Properties box (some comments about the project as a whole) followed by the data sheet with my numbers, followed by the chart we just completed. If you construct a collection of tables and charts and exit the dialogue with OK, it will be saved with the project ready to use again.

That completes this second tutorial. You now know how to set up quite a challenging graphic, and you can use the output in any word-processor, view it in Internet Explorer or just print it on any Windows printer. The next tutorial in the set shows you some possibilities for using GraPL as a very intelligent calculator which can help you to generate the numbers as well as admire the results.