Printing needs to be a lot easier.

In the Construction Trades many intelligent diligent people do not have the time to learn the newest and snazziest ways of sharing and manipulating information like this. Their expertise lies in constructing and managing the personnel that build the very buildings we all inhabit every day. They may well know the digital they need to know for their specific trade inside and out but throwing another and another and another digital tool at them will make them just ignore you completely.

For information like this we as a Construction Firm will print this out at plan size and larger to give everyone a clear calendar of their timeframe while on-site. This allows they or the Superintendent on-site to very easily and clearly to all parties, show who is ahead or behind schedule, and who those delays will impact. The Superintendent will then update the actual Gantt Schedule as needed.

As a former Blueprinter myself, I have the experience to be able to gradually work around the printing limitations of this interface to get what I needed… mostly.

For ourselves, we are taking our Gantt Charts to a print size of 36x72 (3 feet x 6 feet) to be placed on a wall at the jobsite for everyone to see.

I am able to do this by doing the following;

1. In the Full Version of Adobe Acrobat, add a Custom Page Size (your interface will vary, good luck) of 36x72 (3 feet x 6 feet).

2. In the Gantt Chart, PRINT to PNG, Save to Desktop.

3. Right-Click on Saved PNG File, select Convert to PDF.

4. PNG file opens in Adobe Acrobat. The page dimensions should show in the Lower Left-Hand Corner. Ours shows as roughly 30x10 inches.

5. From this PNG file, as an Unsaved PDF file:

a. Select Print

b. Select Adobe Acrobat for the printer

c. Select the Custom Page Size you should have already pre-made

d. After seeing what the “Fit” percentage shows in the print dialog box (236%), I bump it down to 230% for the enlargement/custom scale so that there is still a slight border around the image at the papers edge.

e. Select the Auto Orientation otherwise the image is shoved to the very edge with no border.

6. Hit Print and Save your Plan Sheet Sized PDF file.

If you have and are familiar enough with Photoshop or the like you can certainly do a lot of this easier and quicker in those programs. However, Photoshop from my experience is not a common office program for the general user. The above steps allow the general user to get to a large plan sheet size print after just a little prep work.

you can print to PDF and then use a suitable printer to print on your desired paper size. Hope you know how to print to PDF if not just ask me Sir.