Printing, Combining

[schferk]

Could printing be enhanced ?

First, it would be nice to have some presets from which to choose from, as reports, letters, faxes, mails, etc., perhaps a dozen a so, but even 3 or 4 such presets the user could tweak to his needs, then store, and, when printing, could call up, would be extremely handy (within UR: different margins, different headers / footers, etc. ; even better, presets allowing for presetting printer characteristics: perhaps which one of several given printers, and especially, tray selection (= stationary selection) ; but then, the former characteristics would do, i.e. letters, reports... all with the same paper if necessary). Have a look at ActionOutline, where such print presets ain't perfect but outstanding compared with the competition.

Second, printing a subtree is a real ordeal :

a )

It should be sufficient to select the "head" of that subtree, and then have an option, "print/select the selected item only" vs. "with all its subs", like that we have that in numerous competitors. Here in UR, we first have to expand the whole subtree, then we have to select that whole subtree (by shift-downarrow), and then only we can proceed to printing ; that two unnecessary steps too many.

b )

Then there isn't any option to have any other divider than a pagebreak for each of those items. For many uses, each item on a new page is a good thing, but for many other uses, it's totally inacceptable, especially if you use UR to better construct a piece of work but that then will be presented to third parties.

I know UR has many export options, but it should be possible to correctly print WITHIN UR, not having to go by MS Works Text, MS Word or other third party programs.

It should be possible to have the option to CHOOSE the divider between items when printing within UR, i.e. page break, number x of white lines (i.e. a field for entering 1, 2, 3...), and to have the possibility to choose a special character as divider, fur further processing that is. To my knowledge, UR, at this time, is the only contender not offering any alternative to the page break as a divider when printing several items.

c )

Thus, in order to print a subtree, without page breaks between the items, I had to look further. Of course, there the "help" file, which states, in "Combine Info Items" :

Multiple Info Items (including titles, form fields, rich text or item text) can be combined into a new Text Info Item using the following procedure:

1. Select the Info Items to be combined

2. Copy them to the clipboard (Edit | Copy or Ctrl+C)

3. Navigate to the location for the new combined Info Item

4. Use the Paste Rich Text/Paste Rich Text with titles option to paste the combined Rich Text (available at Edit | Paste Special on the menu)

See Also:
· Print Multiple Info Items
· Import Rich Text
· Helpful Features
Note: Available in Professional edition only."

Well, I was NOT able to do anything good with this "help".

If I try to paste the items into the text field of the new "combined" item, all special paste options are greyed out except for "paste text", and if I do that, I get that subtree, with indents, into the text pane, but without the contents of all those items within that subtree.

Several tries to "paste special", rtf with or without "titles", into a manually put-in new "combined" item, or right into the tree, did not show any acceptable result; all I got was a totally crippled "subtree", showing only the very first indented item of about 20.

d )

So I searched the forum, and the following threads seem to be of interest here :

"Export Subtree Documents to One File" :
http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...hlight=combine

"Combining Items" :
http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...hlight=combine

"3.2 option: 'Show combined note text for multiple...": Can't get it" :
http://www.kinook.com/Forum/showthre...hlight=combine

e )

In one of these, you say,

"Check Tools | Options | Editor | Show combined text for multiple selection, then select the items to export and print to PDF"

- well, this option is not even contained in the QuickOptions list, and for normal uses, I certainly would not want to have the text of several selected items combined, so this feature should be accessible by a quick toggle, just for these print uses, instead of having to search for it in the depths of the options presets.

f )

All this having understood more or less, I suppose the current possibilities are, in practice, to forget UR's inbuilt print engine (= third-party thing ? could it be replaced by something better, then ?), except for printing single items, and to do anything else by exporting (= rtf) into any text program ; for exporting, it seems to be possible to have a code character of your choice for item separation, and within the external text program then, you replace that code char by anything you want, i.e. 2 blank lines, e.g.

BTW, I do a lot of printing of reference things, contained in just 1 single UR item for each of them, and then, in order to print those reference materials on ONE single page, I do indeed macro export, even of single items, to an MS Works 3 column print preset format, where, in case of need, I diminish the point size from 10 to 9... to 8...

g )

But let's face it, it would much more elegant to have good printing possibilities WITHIN UR, even for the 3-columns thing there, and any mention of working on an UR item with MS Word, which is made so easy by UR indeed, goes astray here, since this (for many people assuredly) very handy feature does NOT allow (of course, and how should it do so ?) to work on MULTIPLE UR items.

Thus, UR's MS Word integration does almost nothing for enhancing UR's missing printing power, and so, UR should do something about it, in-house.

h )

Did I overlook something more easy, something more elegant ? Of course, exporting and then printing from third-party software is technically possible, but we should all agree that smooth printing is a feature a program of this class should have by its own means.

P.S.

I'm sorry for having called my own error a "bug", and without a question mark at that, since it's definitely not UR's fault ; a mouse driver ran wild, capturing the right arrow key in such a weird way as described there.