Printing Charts

How to Print a Chart
Print Options Provided by the Print Driver
Printing Color Charts
Multi-Page Charts

Using Large Format Printing Services


Reducing the Size of Tree Charts
Page Breaks
Page Setup for Charts
Printing Problems


Note: This chapter refers to the page setup of chart windows. For example, the chart window that appears after you select Charts > Ancestor and then click Create Chart.

How to Print a Chart

Note: Several printing options are provided in the Page Setup window so it's always a good idea to choose File > Page Setup before printing a chart.

To print the contents of a chart window in Reunion, choose File > Print to open the Print window. The settings in the Print window are applied to your chart and depend on the printer that is currently selected. For more help with selecting a printer, consult your Macintosh Help menu. The name of the selected printer is typically shown in the top of the Print window.

An alternative to printing a chart directly from Reunion is to move the chart into Apple's Preview app. Learn more.

Print Options Provided by the Print Driver

The Print window includes features that are provided by the print driver and macOS, not Reunion. Examples include number of copies and the range of pages to print.

The Print window also includes a "Show Details" button that leads to more options and features (such as "paper handling," "pages per sheet," etc.) that will vary depending on your printer.

Previewing a Chart

The Print window provided by macOS, shown above, includes a small preview of the chart. However, we recommend using the Preview app before printing. The Preview app comes with macOS and is accessed via the PDF button. It lets you see exactly what will be printed before sending anything to the printer. See the illustration below.

Printing Color Charts

You can print color charts on any color printer. To conserve ink, you may want to apply color to the borders of boxes, rather than the "fill" (or insides) of boxes. Or at least choose very light pastels for your box fill colors.

If you print a color chart on a black-and-white printer, the results will depend on the printer and, if applicable, the settings in the Print window, the Page Setup window, or any other Options window(s) provided by the print driver for your printer.

Printing Charts and Reports in Black-and-White

Typically, your multimedia images will consist of both color and black-and-white images. For consistent output, you may prefer to print charts or reports such that all images are converted to black-and-white, rather than having a mix of color and black-and-white images. There are two ways to accomplish this:

Multi-Page Charts

When you print a chart that is larger than one page, the chart will be tiled — printed on several sheets of paper, which you can tape together. The printing order is top-to-bottom and left-to-right as shown here...

Information about how to include page numbers in charts is here.

Using Large Format Printing Services

If you're looking for a company to print large charts, we recommend Heartland Family Graphics because they specialize in printing large charts created with Reunion. You can send them a chart created by Reunion (via email) and they can print it directly to their large format printer. They do a great job at very reasonable prices.

If you want to use another printing service, such a local or online print shop, you'll need to save graphic charts in a file format that will work with their particular printer/software. You should contact them and ask for their preferred file format; most likely it'll be PDF.

Click here to learn about graphic file formats and for more details about saving graphic files.

After creating the chart...

  1. Choose File > Open in Preview.
  2. In the Preview app, choose File > Export and select the file type (required by the printing service you are employing) from the Format menu button near the bottom.
  3. Enter a name for the graphic file and choose the location.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Copy the file to a portable USB drive, or compress it and send to the print shop via email attachment or a file-sharing service like Dropbox.