Opal offers a number of options for printing your outline.
Printing on Mac OS is a two-stage process: first you choose File > Page Setup, then you choose File > Print. Both steps present dialogs, and both dialogs have popup menus in which you can access Opal-specific settings. It is important that you access the Opal settings in both dialogs if you want full control of how Opal prints.
Page Setup. In the Page Setup dialog, choose Opal from the Settings popup menu. Here you determine three things:
Opal can print either a header or a footer on every page. You choose which it is to be, what font should be used, and what its contents should be. The contents of a header or footer can be any combination of custom text (left-aligned), the file’s modified date (centered), or a page number (right-aligned); if you don’t specify that you want at least one of these, no header or footer will be printed.
Opal can print a round-rectangle border around the content portion of each page. The header or footer is outside this rectangle.
You can set the page margins. These are the margins for the content portion of the page; if you are printing a header or a footer, be sure to leave room for it outside the content area (i.e., within the top or bottom margin). Also keep in mind that, depending on your printer, material close to the edge of the paper may not be printed.
The default measurement unit is inches or centimeters, depending on your system preferences (from the International preference pane). After each numeric value you may specify a unit; acceptable units are mm
(millimeters), cm
(centimeters), and in
(inches) — so, for example, 1.2 cm
. Your value will be converted to default units.
Print. In the Print dialog, choose Opal from the third popup menu. Here you get to specify four things:
How much vertical white space should be inserted between topics?
What topics should be printed?
If you check no options, all topics are printed, as if the outline were fully expanded.
If you check “Print current family only,” only the current topic and its family (descendants) are printed.
If you check “Print only focused topics” (enabled only if you are viewing the outline focused, and if “Print current family only” is unchecked), only topics within the current focused view are printed.
If you check “Print only visible topics,” descendants of collapsed topics are omitted.
Should a triangle appear before each topic (“Print triangles”)? If so, then if you also check “Using on-screen symbols,” these triangles are similar to what appears in your document (right-facing or down-facing, hollow or filled); otherwise they are all black right-facing triangles.
Should labels, checkboxes, and lines after topics, if shown, be printed?
Note: Both Page Setup settings and Print dialog settings are saved as part of your document.
Page breaks are determined by the flow of the document, but you can also demand manually that a page break occur before any particular topic. To do so, select the topic and choose Format > Page Break (so that this menu item is checked). The presence of a manual page break is indicated by a row of dots above the topic’s triangle.
A manual page break before the first topic of an outline is ignored.