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I am wondering why a 12 point Arial font, displayed on-screen in Mathematica, delivers output to my printer that is measureably smaller than 12 points when compared to output from other programs? I realize there has been some discussion of this behavior over in the Mathgroup moderated email list through the years, but I just haven't heard/read any really satisfying answers to this.

Now that I am using Mathematica 8.0.1 (Windows 7 64 bit) the behavior seems even worse. I have set the option inspector to use 16 point Arial, which is printing more like 10 point Arial.

Has anyone else noticed this behavior? Is there an obvious solution or work-around? I have even tried setting the magnification to 1.25 under the PrintingOptions portion of Option Inspector, and nothing changed, the printed output remained too small.

Todd Allen
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  • if you use `LevelScheme` for your plots, you can set the size accurately in printer's points. – abcd May 22 '11 at 23:46
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    Thank you to everyone, especially Mr. Wizard & Alexey Popkov, for the kindness of your time and willingness to share your expertise. I am beginning to understand the printing issues I was having from reading your responses! Fantastic! I think many "newbies" to Mathematica have this difficulty in font sizes, so I wish Wolfram Research would strengthen their documentation in this area. Thanks again. – Todd Allen May 23 '11 at 20:57

3 Answers3

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I believe a typical style sheet has different settings for each "environment" (working, printout, slideshow, et cetera).

Try setting: File > Print Settings > Printing Environment to Working

If you require different styles for screen and printing (Working and Printout) you can edit the style sheet sections for the Printout environment to fine tune your results:

enter image description here

Mr.Wizard
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    It is worth to note that the `"Printout"` environment is used by default not only when printing but [also when exporting to PDF](http://groups.google.com/group/comp.soft-sys.math.mathematica/msg/7f5cb9e2d4677855). I have created [separate question](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6093559/how-to-export-graphics-in-working-style-environment-rather-than-printout) on it. – Alexey Popkov May 23 '11 at 06:26
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When Printing the default Screen Environment is "Printout". The reason for the mentioned behavior is that the "Printout" environment style has by default Magnification->0.8 which means that everything is printed at 80 % of the original size:

screenshot

You can change this behavior for a particular notebook by choosing the menu item "Format"->"Edit Stylesheet..." and then creating in the opened window "Style definitions for your_notebook_name" a cell with the following content:

Cell[StyleData[All, "Printout"],
 Magnification->1]
Alexey Popkov
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  • Alexey, that is part of the problem, but it certainly isn't all of it, at least on my system and by my expectations. – Mr.Wizard May 23 '11 at 05:36
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    Now I see your point: style definitions for style environment "Printout" often define font sizes etc. differently than for style environment "Working". It seems that the only way to completely save the default on-screen layout of a notebook when printing it is to set `Printing Environment` to `Working` as you suggest. – Alexey Popkov May 23 '11 at 05:49
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I just found a solution to this which seems to completely change the onscreen view to the one that actually prints out.

You go 'File', 'Printing Settings', 'Show Page Breaks'.

Tom
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