Calendar Printing

If you have a lot of events on a calendar, the printout will take more than one page. We know of 5 ways to avoid this:

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The best way is to use Mozilla or Firefox as your browser. You can obtain either of them free at http://www.mozilla.org. We prefer Firefox, as it is purely a browser and does not have the email client built it. For email, we use Thunderbird. Firefox and Thunderbird, both built on Mozilla, appear to be adding new features much quicker than the Mozilla combination package.

When viewing your calendar in either Mozilla or Firefox, select from the menu File, Print Preview (or Alt-F, V). Or install the "Print Preview" extensions available at https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=314 or https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=282, which create a Print Preview button on the Firefox toolbar (which you access by right-clicking on the toolbar and choosing customize).

Once the print preview view comes up, you can scale the size of the page up or down dramatically and then print out the re-scaled page. This is by far the best way to print out a huge month on one page.

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Another way is to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.0 or above. Strangely, if you click on View, Text Size, and change it to smaller or smallest, the calendar shrinks for printing purposes also. This is the easiest way to make your big calendar print on one page, but sometimes you cannot shrink it enough with this method.

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Another way is to change the settings on your printer to shrink-to-fit. Some printers have "shrink-to-fit" options buried somewhere inside "Properties" or "Options" or "Layout" or "Setup". Set those options to print the web page on a single sheet. How to do this varies with each type of printer.

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Another way is to use Microsoft Word 2000 or later. Go to the calendar month or week you want to print in your browser. Save the file with an .htm extension. Load that file into Microsoft Word 2000. Use the File/Print Preview menu choice (Alt-F,V). Click on the Shrink to Fit icon in the Print Preview toolbar (it shows two pages and an arrow pointing to one page; it is the second icon to the left of Close). Then click on the print icon. This will print your calendar onto a single page, unless it is so huge that MS Word and your printer cannot handle the fonts. Note: Earlier versions of Microsoft Word cannot read the complex HTML files that iCal generates.

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Here is a dorky way to to use Microsoft Word 2000 to print big calendars on a single page: Hit Ctrl-P to print the page. Then choose more than one "Pages per sheet" in the Zoom headings in the bottom right of the menu. This will print more than one page per sheet but will likely break your calendar in the middle of a month.

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Another way is to use Fineprint by Single Track Software. Fineprint enables any Windows program to print in a variety of special formats (such as 4 pages per sheet, etc) and will shrink very large pages into letter-size printouts. The registered version is $40; there is a free version that works fine but limits any printing job to 8 pages (not a problem here) and puts a small identifier for Single Track Software at the bottom of each page printed.

Download FinePrint from FinePrint Software and install it.
Use your browser to go to the calendar month you want to print.
Go to the /administer/general settings menu to change the width of the calendar, if you want. The default width is "Fill Browser Window," and that should work fine.
If you want to set a specific pixel width for a Portrait page, change the width to 930 pixels.
If you want to set a pixel width for a Landscape page, change the width to 1440 pixels.
Remember, you don't have to set a pixel width at all if you use the "Fill Browser Window" setting.
Use your browser to print the page and select FinePrint as your printer. You will then see a Properties button to the right. Use that to button to select "Ledger 11x17" as the paper size and to select either Portrait or Landscape mode, as you wish. Save your changes to the properties. Hit OK to print the page.
When the FinePrint screen appears, you will see a mini-preview of your printout. Set Layout to 1 up, Borders to off, and Margins to none. If you are printing on a black/white printer but have colored text in your calendar, you might want to hit Options and set colored text to black or to the color correction setting, both of which will darken text that might otherwise be too light gray to read.
Then hit OK to print.
The result should be one calendar month on one page, even if the month has many events. Here is a related FinePrint Tutorial on shrinking to fit.