COMPASS Printer Preview Screen

Printing a cave on a piece of paper is very different from viewing the cave in a window. This is because the size and dimensions of the view screen are very different from the size and dimensions of printer or plotter paper. As a result, COMPASS has a special preview screen that displays a scale model of what the printout will look like on your printer.

As you can see, the preview screen displays a simulated piece paper. The paper size and the plot are an exact scale model of the actual printout. If your printer supports color, the preview will appear in color. The preview screen was specifically designed to for cave surveying and it has features that allow you to adjust and position the image without going to a different screen. The tools along the top of the screen allow you to perform precision pans, zooms, and scaling. Arrow icons allow you to pan, move and position the plot. The plus and minus icons allow you to change the scale by zooming in and out. The other arrows allow you to move by a whole page for multi-page plot. The red dot in the grid in upper right shows which page you are printing in a multi-page plot. The rest of the icons allow you to setup the printer, select a different printer and configure the plot. The box in the upper left shows the size of the plotting area on the paper. The next box show the cursor position on the simulated piece of paper. The position is displayed in millimeters or inches, and it is scaled to match the scale of the simulated paper. This is very useful for precisely positioning labels, passages and legends on the paper.

MULTIPAGE PREVIEWS.

When you print a cave at a scale where the image will require more than on page, it can be difficult to align the different parts of the image to different pages. For this reason, COMPASS gives you the option of displaying multiple pages in the Print Preview screen. In this way, you position subsections of the cave in the precise position you want for each page. You can also print all the pages at once.

This image shows the Print Preview screen with nine pages displayed. Here the printer is set to Landscape Mode with 8.5 x 14 paper so the pages are scaled so they match the paper size. The "Cols/Rows" display controls the number of pages that will be displayed. The checkboxes in the upper left-hand corner of each page control which pages will be printed. Here, the two blank pages will not be printed.

This image shows how the Preview Screen can even display complex color plots and bitmap bitmap background images. In other words, with the Preview Screen, what you see is truly what  will be printed.

This image shows one of the color passage modeling modes printed across several pages. Here, the printer is in Portrait Mode, with 8.5 x 11 inch paper.

LOCKING THE CAVE TO THE PAPER.

One of the more useful printing features of COMPASS is the ability to tie plots to specific locations on paper. The image to the right illustrates this capability. With this feature, you can force any station in the cave to be plot at any location on the page. In other words, you can set the exact location of where a survey station appears on the page, regardless of the scale, rotation or view angle of the plot. This is useful for creating quad maps, atlases and publications. In order to tie a station to a location on the paper, you must specify the location and the survey station. You specify the location by entering the X and Y coordinate in the two spin boxes at the top of the page. The location is specified in inches or millimeters from the lower left corner of the page.

Other options include the ability to use thicker lines for the printer (printer lines are much thinner than screen lines), the ability to control the amount of overlap between adjacent pages, and the ability to printer borders or corner registration marks for aligning multi-page plots.