Printing of waveforms

[Shane Broadbent]

Hi all,

I'm trying to find a way to get a printout of a waveform. So far the only
thing I've found is the Print Panel.vi and that's not quite what I'm after.
Is there a way of getting a waveform to print out in some kind of scaleable
format (ie. raster) to a printer? It seems like such an obvious thing to be
able to do, but I can't find anything at the moment. I have LabVIEW 6i
(Professional Develope Edition).

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Shane Broadbent
shaneb@cfcl.com.au

[Gorka Larrea]

One way of doing this is to create a dummy subVI with (mostly) no code, only the graph you want in the front panel and pass data to it when you want to print, and select print panel when execution is complete, so it will be printed in that moment.
Hope this helps

[Shane Broadbent]

Hi Gorka,

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately using this method will still print
the graph out as a bitmap image. I'm after something which will provide a
better result like you would achieve from printing a graph within Excel. Do
you have any other suggestions?

Thanks again.

Regards,

Shane Broadbent

[Gorka Larrea]

What about using activeX and pass data to Excel?

[Shane Broadbent]

Hi Gorka,

Thanks for your idea. I'll give that a try, although I'd prefer to avoid
having to rely on having Excel installed just for printing graphs. I do have
the report generation facilities with my LabVIEW package. Would it be
possible to somehow use that to print the graph with?

Thanks again.

Regards,

Shane Broadbent
shaneb@cfcl.com.au

[Greg_McKaskle2]

> Thanks for your response. Unfortunately using this method will still print
> the graph out as a bitmap image. I'm after something which will provide a
> better result like you would achieve from printing a graph within Excel. Do
> you have any other suggestions?
>

This will print the graph using whatever printing style is selected in the
Tools>>Options dialog. The printing page gives you access to three styles
of printing -- bitmap, standard GDI, and postscript. The default is to send
the drawing commands, lines and such straight to the printer much like vector
graphic. Postscript often looks the nicest, but only works if you have a
postscript printer, and bitmap printing actually increases the resolution
of the bitmap to take advantage of the
printer, rather than using screen
resolution.

Greg McKaskle

[Shane Broadbent]

Hi Greg,

Thanks for the info. That should do the job, but I'm still a little
disappointed that LabVIEW can't do something as simple as printing a
waveform or graph without doing heaps of modifications to the graph (and
placing it in another VI). Do you know if there's a way of getting rid of
the header information which is printed at the top of the page? We're
planning on producing a product which we want to look professional, and that
header info tends to make it look pretty amateur.

Thanks again.

Regards,

Shane Broadbent
shaneb@cfcl.com.au


"Greg McKaskle" wrote in message
news:3B39D085.AF192C51@austin.rr.com...
> > Thanks for your response. Unfortunately using this method will still
print
> > the graph
out as a bitmap image. I'm after something which will provide
a
> > better result like you would achieve from printing a graph within Excel.
Do
> > you have any other suggestions?
> >
>
> This will print the graph using whatever printing style is selected in the
> Tools>>Options dialog. The printing page gives you access to three styles
> of printing -- bitmap, standard GDI, and postscript. The default is to
send
> the drawing commands, lines and such straight to the printer much like
vector
> graphic. Postscript often looks the nicest, but only works if you have a
> postscript printer, and bitmap printing actually increases the resolution
> of the bitmap to take advantage of the printer, rather than using screen
> resolution.
>
> Greg McKaskle

[Greg_McKaskle2]

....Do you know if there's a way of getting rid of
> the header information which is printed at the top of the page? We're
> planning on producing a product which we want to look professional, and that
> header info tends to make it look pretty amateur.
>

Open the VI Properties dialog. It contains a Printing page with this and
other options specific to printing that VI.

I also wish this were easier, but you were able to customize your graph
to the way that you wanted it. Meanwhile the guy who really wants a
printout of the settings with the results gets his way too, and with
very little work.

The way LV currently does this lets you start with a screen that is
probably pretty close to what you want to print, and lets you do as

little or as much customization as you like.

If these customizations weren't done interactively, they would need to
be parameters or properties of each control. There would be hundreds
or thousands of them.

In the future, we plan to add a wizard that build the subVI and makes some
common edits to get you started, but once you know how to do this,
it really isn't that hard, is it?

Greg McKaskle