GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 163595
Printing objects (charts) with a specific physical size
Last modified: 2011-09-29 21:59:34 UTC
Not a bug! EXCEL has no ability to produce scaled charts. They are best for use in education (math lessions). For example I look for a bar chart, which axis are exact scalable for printer output: 10 units for 10 cm. I've just downloaded Gnumeric and: No Option to produce such scaled charts. Is it a topic for your todo list? Best wishes from Minden, Germany Manfred Kresse
Using the context menu (right click on a chart) you can save them as individual files. You could use the results of that to print at what ever scale you're looking for. Internally we store a logical size for the chart (in pts) but I can't think of an interface for exposing that during printing. This is a good idea, but we'll need some design suggestions for how the interface would look.
I also feel a need to control the size of the graphs. Currently, the only way to set the size is with a mouse. This is not very convinient. I suggest to add the size into Customize Chart as a new tab Position of the Graph part, similar to the Position tab of Chart1 part. Second part is to make the properties be saved as Theme and be applicable to the newly created charts. I guess this part is in development now... Best regards, Vladimir
Note that you can set the size using the keyboard: select a chart, place the mouse so that the tool-tip showing the size is visible and then use ctrl-arrows to cahnge the size.
Your description includes mouse actions: you cannot select a chart using the keyboard (bug 338615), and obviously 'place the mouse' can not be done by the keyboard. Moreover, versions before 1.9.15 suffer from bug 599887, forcing you to move the mouse again to see the results of alt- or ctrl-arrows use. You are right that these keyboard commands help to fine adjust the size though. The size is controlled in pixels for this commands, and this is logical on the screen. Additional indication in pts is of some help, of course, assuming that 1 pnt is 1"/72 in all further conversions (for export and print). In the properties, the size units could be selectable from a list of pxls, mm, inch, pts. Well, same list can be a global setting affecting also how the size is shown in the tool-tip...
One additional thing to be cared when the chart size handling is modified. Currently the chart size is strictly connected to the row heights and column widths touching the chart, so strictly, that even the same size in pixels corresponds to slightly different size in pts when the chart is over different columns/rows (of different height/width). And if a size of a column/row is changed, the size of the chart is also changed. This is particularly surprising if the chart was outside of the screen when the change happened. In my opinion, the size of a chart might be connected to the cell sizes on creation time only (when pasted etc). Personally, I'd prefer even that time they are kept independent. All other time, View -> Zoom is the command to scale everything together... Perhaps the mentioned different relation of a pts to a pixel is related to the screen resolution, I have screen DPI 124.0 both vertical and horizontal in my preferences. FreeBSD 8, x.org 7.4, gnome 2-28, gnumeric 1.10.0.
You can now set a certain size for your chart via the Size & Position item in the context menu. (Specified in pts or screen pixels.) On the same context menu there is a print item with which you can print just that chart in any scale you desire. I believe that should do the job. This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.