MeisterTip #4 – Printing Maps

Printing large mind maps in a way in which they’re still readable has always been a bit tedious. Recently our support team has seen a flood of requests asking for help with the MindMeister print feature – especially when maps have become rather large – so we decided to post this step-by-step guide in the MeisterTips series.

The occasion might arise when you’d like to print a large map, but don’t want to shrink it down to a 8.5 x 11 (or A4), thereby making it unreadable. The solution? Break out the scotch tape, and get ready to print your map on multiple pages! To do this, there’s a very minor dance that needs to take place between your MindMeister printing (export) options and how you tell your PDF viewer to physically print the map.

To get started printing your larger-than-life mind map, select ‘Print’ from the options in the top menu bar. This will open up a dialogue box that presents you with a number of printing options. While printing directly from the browser window is technically possible, we’d recommend first printing to a PDF, and then using your PDF reader’s print function to send it to the printer (things just tend to work better using this method).

In the options dialogue, you’ll see a dropdown menu that gives you the option to select your preferred paper size. To print your map to multiple pages, select the ‘full’ option. Finish the action by clicking ‘Print’.

From here, MindMeister will export your map to your installed PDF reader (most probably Adobe Acrobat), and will present you with the option to, or automatically download it depending on your browser settings.

Proceed to print a PDF as you normally would. However – and this might be a setting you’ve overlooked as well. In Acrobat’s print settings dialogue, under the dropdown menu for ‘Page Scaling’ select ‘Tile all pages’. This is the setting that tells your PDF reader that you want to print the map over multiple pages.

By exporting your mind maps to a PDF format, and then using the PDF reader to select how you’d like your maps printed is a great way to make sure that even your largest maps don’t get compressed down to an unreadable format on a standard 8.5 x 11 or A4 sized sheet of paper.