I have collected a lot of thoughts and notes for a workshop I am supposed to lead, and now I just want to print the scappling to take them with me: This demands a lot of (IMHO unnecessarily) fumbling with notes-dragging and printing preview checking in order not to have notes cut in two. An option to (temporarily) display the printing borders would help immensely, so I suggest this enhancement.
A logical place would be in the “View”-menu, and the defining base would be the print settings (paper orientation and scaling).
Why does it matter if the notes are cut in two? Can’t you just paste them together? At any rate, it’s not possible to show printing borders, because OS X’s default printing mechanisms determine where the pages get cut, and I have no way of knowing that to show it in the view.
If I wanted to have one large sheet, yes. But I have groups of notes around different subtopics which I wanted on separate sheets, simply A4 size.
Okay. That leaves us with the fiddling.
In case someone has a similar problem: I found the best strategy is to first create some bigger notes with page numbers and to move them until they end up in the upper left corners in the preview. That gives an idea where to put the rest of the scapplings.
That would require some fiddling at the moment as the export engines for PNG and PDF don’t align the background texture the same way that the main scapple application does.
I did something similar…created a bordered scappling (with just the word “margins”) the right width for my printout and duped it across the page and lined up addition columns accordingly. Particularly easy for columns, but probably for other uses also.
BTW: I just created my first major Scapple file (250+ notes) and am amazed at the simplicity/flexibility. And the fact that I can drag any or all of those notes into a freeform Scrivener corkboard and have all my docs set up to write*…I’ll happily give up printout ease for that.
OK, I guess it would be nice to be able to assign “hierarchies” to scapplings which would thereby automatically set up the Scrivener hierarchy…but, hey, it’s late here in the States…maybe I’m dreaming.
I found creating my own false borders was useful. I used the print function to determine the page size of an A4 and A3 printout, then built a New Background shape of that size and used that to organise and resize the notes. Not perfect, but functional.
I also don’t use this while taking notes in free-form. But it would be nice to turn on, turn off…
Would be nice if there were a default of this function, especially as it seems a common requirement.
Alternately, if there is a users community forum with share-able files that have users best examples, etc, that would be handy.
I have around 25 scapple files. My largest scapple to date is 543 notes. I no longer use any other note-taking tool on my MAC.