July 1996

Printing Designer/2000 diagrams

By Daniel Bill

Oracle's Designer/2000 has introduced many new diagrams to help us visualize information relating to the analysis and design of software applications. However, there's one annoying limitation of working with diagrams in Designer/2000--you can't print a large diagram to fit on a single page. In this article, we'll look at a method to work around this limitation.

Designer/2000 print options

Figure A shows Designer/2000's Data Diagrammer loaded with a large data model diagram. The standard way of printing a diagram such as this from Designer/2000 is to select the Print option from the File menu. To preview what will be sent to the printer, select the Print Preview option from the File menu.

Large diagrams such as the one shown in Figure A would print divided over several pages, as shown in the Print Preview screen in Figure B. This can be quite annoying because once the diagrams are printed, you then have to literally cut and paste the multiple pages together to show the complete diagram. Unfortunately, there's no way of printing the full diagram to fit on one page from Designer/ 2000. There is, however, a workaround to this problem.

Printing on one page--a workaround

Printing a large diagram on one page requires that you use another application that can handle graphical images. We'll use Microsoft Write to show you how to do this. However, you could use virtually any Windows program, such as WordPerfect, Word, or Lotus.

With a diagram open in the Data Modeller, select Copy from the Edit menu. This will copy the full diagram to the clipboard as a text file, in which all the lines and pieces of text appear as sets of coordinates.

Now open the Write application. Select the Edit menu and then the Paste Special option. The Paste Special dialog box will appear, as shown in Figure C, prompting you for the format to use to paste the diagram. Select Picture in the Data Type list box and then click the Paste button.

As you can see in Figure D, the entire diagram is now pasted into our Write document. You can resize the diagram to fit the page. You can also add titles, logos, and other text to your diagram--something you can't do in Designer/2000. Now all we need to do is print the page.

Windows also allows you to print to a file in encapsulated postscript (EPS) format. This method is useful if you want to plot or print your diagram on a device other than a standard Windows printer. If you have access to a large format plotter or can employ a service bureau that does, your diagrams can be plotted out poster size using the EPS file.

Conclusion

One limitation of Designer/2000 is that you can't print a large diagram on a single page. We've shown you a workaround you can use to overcome this limitation.

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Exploring Oracle Developer/2000 and Designer/2000 is a publication of The Cobb Group.

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