MapPoint Printing
The idea was simple this morning... Take a Map Point file with some truck route stuff drawn on it and print it to our plotter. Simple right?
WRONG... Seems MapPoint doesn't do a good job of printing. I didn't think this would be that hard. But Map Point only prints what was on the screen. So if you zoom in enough to get some good detail on the streets, then the print doesn't have everything. Zoom out to get everything and then you lose the detail on the streets.
The solution?
Well try, try, Google search, try some more and at some point think about giving up only to try some more (along with a few more searches on google). I did end up with a solution, though it wasn't as good as I wanted, nor was it easy enough I would do it on a normal basis.
What I ended up doing was saving small parts of the map (so I was zoomed in to get the better detail) as a webpage. I could set how many pixels it is, so I got a good amount of data in one screenshot. To get extra room I used my dual monitors and created a real big screen (2200x768). After creating 18 images I had enough to make the image I wanted. Just had to find a way to "stitch" them together.
I first tried Photoshop, but that was just to much work. First off, some of the images where rotated just a tad, making it just a complete pain to line up everything. Then I remembered a feature of Microsoft Image Suite. So copy all the images to my tablet and opened Image Suite. Selected the images and then ran the Panoramic stitching tool. This worked very well!!! Wish I would have thought of that this morning instead of trying to use Photoshop.
After having the single image file, I thought I was home free, Not! Printing didn't really please me. The print out still wasn't as clear as I wanted, nor was it very readable. I thought maybe printing to 2 sheets (48" wide) might clear things up some. But um, How do you split the image and print to 2 sheets? Crap... Back to google...
After trying a couple of shareware programs, Manually trying to cut the image, and other ideas that crashed and burned, I found the answer. It was really simple, to simple. I would have never thought of it, but thanks to google and much searching I found a solution, Excel!
Yep, you heard right, Excel, the spreadsheet program! Bet you didn't know it doubles as a Poster printing software! Open excel, insert image, and Boom! you get all the great excel printing features! Print 1 sheet across by 3 sheets wide, Print preview each sheet, it is just great. All I had to do was change the margins around so it didn't waste a 3rd of the paper. Other then that I was simple.
Now, Excel was great, but the finale image wasn't. The client was more then happy with it, but for me, I thought it was sub-par. Maybe its because my wife is a Photographer and I expect better printouts. I don't know the reason, but I am glad that project is over.
And to think, I use to like MapPoint!
~Dal