Advanced Printer Control
Pedigree Assistant has a very powerful mechanism for managing printer setup.
It is possible to control, on a document-by-document basis, all these printer settings:
Paper size - A4, US Letter, A3, etc.
Margins.
Orientation - portrait or landscape.
Printer device settings - such as print quality, paper tray etc.
We call each such collection of printer setup information a 'printer/paper configuration' (PPC). You can have as many PPC's as you like. Each different pedigree layout is associated with a PPC that controls the overall print layout and printer settings.
At its simplest level, there are 2 PPC's that are used for most documents we supply with the product. Both are set to print using the system printer defaults (probably A4 or US Letter sized paper depending on your location). One PPC prints in landscape and is used for all default landscape pedigree layouts; the other prints in portrait style and is used for all portrait-style documents such as contracts, reports etc.
Most users find this more than ample for their needs and never even need to know about PPC's. However when your printing needs go beyond the basic you'll find PPC's very useful. Thats because you can set up completely different printing environments on a document-by-document basis, without having to continually change how your system printer is set - as you do with virtually all other pedigree programs. E.g:
You might want to use a manual feed tray on your printer when printing with a particular pedigree layout. E.g. in order to use a special high quality paper. This is just a matter of creating a new PPC which has printer-specific settings set to use manual tray loading, and then you associate that PPC with the relevant pedigree layout. When you print pedigrees of this type, the printer will then use paper from the manual feed tray.
You might have two printers: a laser printer - your system default printer - for most uses, and an A3 paper size color printer for producing 7 generation high quality pedigrees. You might create a PPC that is set to use the A3 printer, configured for A3 paper, and associate this with a special pedigree layut you have created that is set up for 7 generations.
