Printing Displayed Data

Choosing a printer

You should choose a printer via the specfe preferences dialog before attempting to print. You'll need to give the command needed to print a postscript file to your printer. In most cases that will be a variant of the lpr command, most probably lpr -P<printer>, where <printer> is the printer name that you wish to print to.

Single Page Printing

This is relatively straightforward: choose the Graph->Print Graph command, or click on the Print button above the graph and the current graph will be printed out. The size and aspect ratio of the printed graph should match the size displayed on your screen (unless your screen's resolution is wrongly configured in which case the sizes may not match.

Thumbnail Printing

You can also print out a group of small graphs collected onto a single page. Use the preferences dialog to specify the layout of graphs on the page. Then each time you choose the Graph->Print Graph N-up command, or click the Print N-up button above the graph then a scaled version of the current graph will be added to the output page. When the page fills up it will printed out, or choose the Graph->Printout N-up Graphs command to print out the graphs that have been added so far, and start a new page.

In this case the size of the printed graph is determined by the preferences dialog and is independent of the size or aspect ratio of the graph window.

Saving a graph as a postscript file

Choose the Graph->Save Graph as Postscript... to save the contents of the current graph in a postscript file. You'll be presented with a file save dialog to choose where to save the file. The graph scale will be the same as the screen display.

Useful Printing Hints

You may find it useful to save the individual postscript files used in printing. These may be found in the specfe temporary directory (usually ~/.specfe/). The file specfe.ps will contain the postscript for the most recently printed single page graph. The files page<n>.ps (where <n> is an integer from 1 up to the number of N-up pages) contain the postscript for recently printed N-up pages. The file pagen.ps contains a multi-page print job containing the most recent N-up printout and the file pagenup.ps contains the postscript for the most recent N-up printout.