Printing Large Files

Question

Printing Large Files

SomeYahoo (Military)

(OP)

12 Jun 06 14:37

Now that I have gotten everything to work, I'm trying to print my document 'o many points. It ends up sending a 200Mb file to the printer and takes around a half-hour to get done.

Is there any way to print a "snapshot" or the equivalent? I have some co-workers angry that they don't have access to the printer.

Any and all help is greatly appreciated.

pstuckey (Electrical) · Answer 1 · 2006-06-12 15:50:44

If you have Adobe Acrobat (full version, not the reader) installed you can make a PDF. Adobe does not have a "built-in" .mcd translator, but from within Mcad you can print to a PDF. Open your file in Mcad, File>Print> then under "printer name" you will have the option to print to PDF. This will make a .pdf that will likely be much smaller than your worksheet.

Peter

SomeYahoo (Military) · Answer 2 · 2006-06-12 16:41:15

Don't have the full version... bummer. Sounds like it could be a good solution.

IRstuff (Aerospace) · Answer 3 · 2006-06-12 18:50:59

Might not matter. Someone still has to crank through the extra data points, even if it's to decide to not print them.

Your best bet to making it more palatable is to decimate the points on the graph. There really isn't much point in graphing 100,000 points when your display is limited to maybe 2048 pixels or printer limited to maybe 5000 dots.

TTFN

Diquan (Civil/Environmental) · Answer 4 · 2006-06-12 23:34:00

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SomeYahoo (Military) · Answer 5 · 2006-06-13 08:07:37

Thanks for the tips. IRstuff, any insight on the best way to decimate data? I'm afraid of losing frequency information along the way.

It's probably simple, but it's been a while, you know?

pstuckey (Electrical) · Answer 6 · 2006-06-13 11:14:23

The advantage of converting to PDF is that the time to crank through the extra points happens on the local machine in creating the PDF, rather than tying up the network printer for 1/2 hour to print. I've never fiddled with the default PDF settings with Acrobat on my machine (it looks like choices include "high quality", "press quality", "standard", and "smallest file size"), I've been using "standard" (600 dpi, and several different resolutions for different image types - monochrome, color) and that has generally been given good print quality and usually a pretty significant file size reduction.

Decimation can be a good technique, but it is definitely data dependent. For instance you can decimate before the FFT, but only if the signal BW is within the Nyquist BW of the lower sample rate. To do this the data is filtered digitally and every nth sample is picked off to lower the sample rate. It is also possible to drop samples after the FFT, but this may (or may not) result in visible changes to the graph.

Given the availability of free PDF converters, I would give that a try first and see how that works before trying decimation.

Peter

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Printing Large Files