PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing User Guide
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing Table of Contents The guide includes the following sections: • Installation & First Program Start • Creating a new Document • Main Window • Mediathek • Tool Palettes • Template • Page overview • Image properties • Cell properties • Print • Central working area • Editing an image cell • Editing an image • Cropping an image • Rotating and flipping an image • Cutting options for roll paper • Horizontal Toolbar • Preferences 2
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing Manual for Printing with PrinTao 8 Installation & First Program Start After downloading PrinTao 8, the disk image is opened with a double click. Using the mouse, the program icon can be drawn to the application folder alias. This action moves it to the application folder. Starting PrinTao 8 for the first time, the user license agreement will show up. Having agreed, PrinTao 8 can be unlocked for the appropriate printer models using a purchased license file.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing Creating a new Document A new document has to be created before the actual work with PrinTao 8 can start. Therefore, a clearly structured dialog is guiding the user through the process of selecting printer (1), paper type (2), print quality (3), and paper source (4) as well as the print media size (5). For convenience, PrinTao 8 shows only the actually available options: For example, just those quality options can be selected, which are supported by the printer.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing The main window of PrinTao 8 is basically sectioned into five areas: The Mediathek (1), which optionally displays Metadata (2) for the image selected at the workspace or Mediathek. Furthermore a horizontal toolbar (3) above, some tool palettes (4) and the central working area (5). Within these areas the entire process from selecting images, defining page layout to the final print order will take place.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing Images can be directly drawn with the mouse from the preview window to PrinTao’s central working area. They will be inserted to the document according to the selected template. Performing a double click on an image inside the Mediathek, opens it with the default software for this file type. Right-Clicking opens a context menu offering further options and hitting the space bar key opens the selected image with the OS X QuickLook preview.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing The template preview (3) shows all available pre-defined, free and custom templates. Templates which are not applicable (4), because they do not fit within the selected paper size, are crossed out and not selectable. A switch (5) changes the type of template preview display between icons, list and list of icons with description. The template can also be changed, if the document already contains images.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing The background colors of the slider control indicate whether the resolution is set optimally. Regularly, the best print results can be achieved between 200 dpi and 400 dpi (green area). At lower resolutions (red area, image is too large), individual pixels may become visible and higher resolutions (yellow area, image is too small) can lead to artifacts due to scaling.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing The perceptual rendering intent, also referred to as photographic rendering intent, compresses a larger source color space into the printer’s color space. Relative color differences are preserved with this compression, resulting in an image impression, which is appealing to the human eye. This rendering intent is well suited for photographic printing.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing Central working area The central working area shows the print media, on which the images are placed and prepared for printing. By selecting an image with a mouse click, a context sensitive toolbar (2) appears. From left to right, it is containing the following controls: Edit cell, edit image, crop image, rotate image by 90°, mirror image and set cell size. The lever in the middle of the cell is used to rotate (1) the cell or the image respectively.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing Rotating and flipping an image In edit cell mode (1), the rotate tool (4) rotates the cell by 90° clockwise. In edit image mode(2) and in crop image mode(3), it rotates the image inside the cell. Holding down the [shift] key, results in a rotation by 90° counterclockwise. The mirror tool (5) flips the image horizontally. Holding down the [shift] key, results in a vertically flipping.
PrinTao 8 Effortless Professional Printing The Metadata (1) option allows to include image file names and/ or creation dates with the print. If one of these options is checked, this information will be added to the lower left corner of each image cell. Using the Zoom (3) buttons, the display size of the central working area can be adjusted. The “Fit to window” (4) options sets the zoom to a level, the whole print media fits completely into the central working area window.
