How to set the ruler to cm in the Print Manual Designer

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VincentBevort
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How to set the ruler to cm in the Print Manual Designer

Unread post by VincentBevort »

Hi,

I cannot find how to set the ruler in the Print Manual Designer to centimeter or millimeter.

I set HM itself to centimeters in the program option (editor tab) but when opening the designer it is in inches.
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Darren Rose
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Re: How to set the ruler to cm in the Print Manual Designer

Unread post by Darren Rose »

Hi if you click in the top left corner of the rulers where it says in it will change to cm

see screenshot below
manual.jpg
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Tim Green
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Re: How to set the ruler to cm in the Print Manual Designer

Unread post by Tim Green »

You can also change the units used permanently for the main Help & Manual program in View > Program Options > Editor. Note that using units like inches and cm only has very limited usefulness there, because they have very little relation to reality in most output formats. There are so many variables when displaying pages on screens that you will almost never get anything even close to a measurement in inches or cm (zoom level, screen resolution, the number of real pixels grouped to form virtual pixels on high-resolution screens etc. etc.) Even when printing on paper the actual final size of elements depends on the resolution of the printer, the size of the paper and other factors.

Also, Help & Manual uses pixels internally for everything, and if you use other values you may experience rounding errors when arriving at the pixel value internally. We generally recommend using pixels for your dimensions. Here too, of course, this is less relevant in Manual Designer, which only works in cm or inches... :)
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VincentBevort
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Re: How to set the ruler to cm in the Print Manual Designer

Unread post by VincentBevort »

Thanks Darren,

Would not have found that "Button".

I already set the program option to CM but this only seems to work for the HM program itself and not for the designer. (maybe a bug?)

I know that the figures are not exact and depend on e.g. the selected printer for PDF but if I use the same default printer when creating PDF I should get almost the same layout as I get when converting Word doc to PDF.
I want to work with cm because I am trying to recreate the current manuals in Word and my current settings for Word are in cm so I can take the margins and so on as they are set in my Word document.
I want to make a template for PDF to verify if this feature works for us.
E.g. I plan to set a border on each page and for this I want to see the layout in cm.

Would be great to have the setting described by Darren in the Options popup for the designer to make this setting permanent as well (or maybe an option to inherit it from HM)
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Tim Green
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Re: How to set the ruler to cm in the Print Manual Designer

Unread post by Tim Green »

I already set the program option to CM but this only seems to work for the HM program itself and not for the designer. (maybe a bug?)
Manual Designer doesn't currently adopt the setting from HM but it might be an idea for it to do that, at least if HM is using either inches or cm. You would still be able to change it by clicking on the button, but it would be useful for it to follow the HM setting. I've added this as a possible Wish List item for HM updates. 8)
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