I’m trying to print the map included when getting driving directions on Mapquest, and print it as full sized as possible on normal size paper.
What I’ve done so far is hit the “print screen” button on my keyboard when looking at the driving directions on my monitor. Then I opened Microsoft Word and clicked “Ctrl and V” at the same time to paste the page in Word. I then cropped everything out except for the map.
This is where I’m stuck. I want to print the map as big as possible instead of just taking up a small part of the paper and having plenty of empty space. When I click on the magnifying glass icon, it seems I can only enlarge the image as viewed on the monitor, and not how it will be printed on paper.
Anyone know what I’m doing wrong or if I should just go about this a different way?
You are clicking the magnifying glass in Print Preview mode. That has no effect on what it looks like printed, only lets you zoom in on what the printed image is expected to look like.
Go back to edit mode (I suggest Print Layout View [*not * Print Preview] to see the actual page layout, but Normal will work too).
Click once on the map. You should see the graphic with little handles (black squares) around the edges. Grab a corner and drag the corner to enlarge the graphic to whatever size you want.
Alternatively right-click the graphic and select “format picture”, select the Size tab, and adjust to some %. This isn’t as good because you’ll have do do it more than once to get the size right.
Be aware that when you enlarge a graphic beyond 100% it will degrade because you’re just magnifying the pixels, not increasing resolution. Insetad of a little grainy picture, you’ll have a big grainy picture.
Right-click the map and “Save as …” (I do this instead of Print Screen because it gives me just the object, not the whole screen; if the latter is really what you want, Print Screen is the right choice.) Open a blank Word document. Insert - Picture - From File … the one you just saved. Go to Format - Paragraph; set to centered, no line spacing before or after. Go to File - Page Setup; set page margins to the minimum width your printer will support (generally 0.5 or lower). Also, orient the page (Portrait or Landscape) as appropriate to fit the map; on Mapquest, the maps are square, so it doesn’t matter, but I mention this as it will be relevant in other contexts (e.g., screen shots). Finally, go to the Layout tab and set Vertical Allignment to Center. Now, go back to the map; right-click and go to Format Picture. There are all sorts of toys here to make color pictures print better on a grayscale printer, but what you need right now is the Size tab. Set width or height (whichever is going to be the contraining factor) to the maximum size your printer will support. Here, for example, that’ll mean set width for 7.5 inches. The map is now as large as you can get it on a single sheet of standard printer paper.
Also note for next time: MapQuest presents the map as a graphic image, so you can right-click it and select Copy. You don’t have to take a screen shot and then crop it down. (This doesn’t work for Google Maps, but exactly why I’m not sure. It seems to use an applet, but I don’t know why you can’t copy the image.)
Google doesn’t use applets, those images are PNGs. Google Maps is brilliant use (IMHO) java-script trickery and AJAX. Disable java-script and then right-click, boom you can save the map (or at least a piece of the map, it’s divided up).
Just to make sure, are you selecting the largest map size mapquest offers? I beleive they offer “large map” mode which should take up most of hte page if you print it out. They also have a “printable page” link you can click on that removes the frames and such so you get more map and less clutter.