You spend a great deal of time on your lesson plans.  It can be frustrating when you go to print ... and it will not fit on one page.  These tips should help in most cases. However, there will be times that the only way to make it all fit is to reduce the amount of text in your plans.

Reorganize Your Plans

Since your planbook is printed as a grid, the height of each row is determined by the tallest box in the row.  If one box has a lot of text, it will push down the whole row.  Sometimes it is possible to move some of that text to a different row, which can help distribute your plans better and allow them to fit on one page.

Split Your Plans

When you go to the print screen there are two set of options.  The first prints your entire week at once.  Below that is an option to split your week.  This will split your lesson plans into a left and right side.  Depending on how you have your planbook set up, the left side will either be the first half of your days (generally Mon to Wed) or the first half of your periods(1 to 4 if you have 8 periods).  Likewise the right side will have the remainder of the week.

Print From Browser - Page Break

When printing from the browser it is very difficult for us to control the final result.  It is not possible for PlanbookEdu to control the margins or page breaks.  One thing we can do to help is show you an estimated page break.  It appears as a red line on the screen, but will not show when printed.

Print From Browser - Shrink To Fit

When printing from the browser it can often be helpful to view the print preview first.  This is generally available under File -> Print Preview.  For Safari this option is available in the standard print dialog (File -> Print).  Using this will give you a more accurate view of what your printout will look like. 

An important option provided by many browsers is the Scale setting.  It looks different for each browser.

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Safari

Although it is tempting to select the Shrink To Fit setting that is available in Internet Explorer and Firefox, this probably won't help you much.  What it's doing is shrinking the width to fit and allowing long pages to spill over. 

Instead, try setting various percentages to see if your planbook will fit on one page without being too small to read.  This works best if your plans are only slightly longer than one page.

Print From Browser - Margins

Most browsers provide the ability to change the top and bottom margins.  Usually this is found in the Page Setup menu.  The defaults are between .5 and .75 inches each for the top, bottom and each side.  By changing these it's possible to get an extra inch or more onto each page.

Internet Explorer

Firefox

Print From Word

Exporting your planbook to Microsoft Word before printing allows you greater flexibility for shrinking the text.  You can manually re-size the text by first typing ctrl-A (or cmd-A on Mac) to select all the text.  Then ctrl-[ (cmd-[) to shrink all the text. If you shrink the text too small simply hit ctrl-] (cmd-]) to enlarge it.

More recent version of MS Word also provide a "Shrink One Page" option that will try to remove one page from your printout.  If your plans are spilling over onto a second page this can help get them down to one page.  You can access this by going to print preview, then clicking the Shrink One Page button.  Unfortunately, this doesn't work all the time.  If there is too much text you will get the message "After several attempts, Word was unable to shrink the document by one page."