Changing page overlap in tiled prints

[dahveed]

Greetings all,

This concerns Visio Standard 2003 (SP2).

You may have observed that if you have a Visio drawing of large page size, and configure the page setup to print it across multiple sheets of paper, Visio does a theoretical overlap of 1/2 inch (12 mm) at the page edges. If you turn on page break display (View menu --> Page Breaks), you can see this area on-screen as a gray strip. But I get a tiny effective overlap of about 3/16 inch (5 mm) due to part of that 1/2 inch falling outside the physical printing boundaries of my (laser) printer. When I then go to cut near the sheet edges and tape each sheet to the next to assemble the large drawing from the tiles, that's precious little overlap to work with and the seams may cross several shapes containing text, which is undesirable.

My question is: How can I cause Visio to print with larger overlap? I can find no such setting anywhere. I realize that as overlap increases, net drawing size (given the same number of printout pages) must shrink; for example two 17 x 11-inch pages tiled together could hold a 33 x 11 drawing if 1-inch overlap, but only 31 x 11 if 3-inch overlap, etc.  I'm fine with that loss. I would like to have an easier time with cutting/taping, and be able to have wider latitude to choose where the Xacto-knifed seams fall (so as to minimize number of text-filled shapes crossing them).

Thanks if anyone knows how to accomplish this!
Dave
p.s. YES, I realize the right answer is "GET A PLOTTER AND STOP TILING!!"  But department budgets aren't going to let that happen soon.

[Paul Herber]

I think you mean the page margins, menu File -> Page Setup
on the Print Setup tab click the Setup button and adjust the margins.

[dahveed]

Well, er, "DUHHHH" I guess I should say. That worked, in that I have a 34"x11" drawing that tiles horizontally across two 17"x11" pages; I set 1-inch left and right margins, and sure enough got almost 2 inches overlap.  Thanks for the tip; I would've never tried that because to me it's completely counterintuitive. In most applications, "margins" mean the white space inside of which your printed matter is constrained. Suddenly when I'm dealing with tiles, the Visio "margins" define the overlap area in which stuff does print, but only at the boundaries where there the pages meet! That is, once I set those 1" margins, the result was on the left side of my left page, I got a 1" whitespace margin; on the right side of the left page and the left side of the right page, it printed all the way to the page edge (less physical printer boundary; this to me is weird if the "margin" is 1"); and on the right side of the right page, again a 1" whitespace margin. This to me is bizarre and non-meaningful behavior (Are you listening, Microsoft?!) and hence why I was looking for a separate tiling overlap control like I've seen in other applications (such as Acrobat if I recall). Anyway thanks very much Paul!!
Cheers/Dave

[Paul Herber]

Interesting how different people think, your idea of "tiles" is the counter-intuitive idea to me. To me a Visio document is just a drawing canvas of any size. When it comes to printing then there is only a certain area of the paper that can be printed on, the non-printing area is in the margins, so, when printing on 8" wide paper with 1/2" margins left and right if printing at 100% then the canvas will be split into 7" chunks.