Help with Sketch and Printing

Tools
#1

I am training myself on Sketch and am only about 3 days in so not a lot of experience. I was trying to print out my wireframe/flow diagram to PDF from Sketch and all my pages came out blank.

I think the issue has to do with the size of my artboard which is approximately 7,000 x 4,000 pixels in size which comes out to somewhere around 95 inches wide so it’s really no wonder

Each of my iPhone screens (artboards) on the Sketch canvas? are 375x 667 pixels in size but there are 6 of them.

The wireframe is a pretty basic tree, at the top center is the app’s home page or home screen and below that are 5 additional wireframes representing 5 in app destination screens that can be reached from the home screen.

Does anyone have an idea where I went wrong? Thanks in advance!
Steve

#2

I think it’s most probably the artboard size. So you try to fit the flow chart to an A4 size artboard, you can find the preset on the right side panel once your artboard tool is selected. Even if it’s not fitting to an A4, I prefer to split the flow diagram to multiple a4 and then print each artboard and stick it with a tape.

#3

@SteveCrow you will also find a lot of free wireframing tools which will improve your wireframing productive if you compare wireframing using sketch. If you are not familiar with the tools then its worth trying it out.

#4

Hi @jaisonjustus - I am beginning to see the issue more clearly. Even though the screen sizes I’ve used in my wireframe appear to be correct for an iphone 6 - they are too big to fit even one screen on a single sheet of A4 paper. My complete diagram would take about 84 A4 sized pages to print out to paper (12 A4 pages wide and 7 A4 pages tall!)

I’ve attached a screenshot of one of my screens to give you an idea of the sizing.

I can’t find a command in Sketch to shrink the content of my entire artboard to fit a single piece of A4 paper. Do you know of a command like that in Sketch - a “shrink artboard to fit page” command???

Maybe where I am going wrong is in creating screen sizes in my wifreframe diagram that are the same size as the physical iPhone 6 - conceptually it makes sense to me that each of my screens should be much smaller in the diagram but when you ask Sketch to create an artboard for you representing an iPhone 6 (for example) it creates one at 375 x 667 so that’s what I used.

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#5

Hello @SteveCrow 84 papers are quite a lot, I prefer you to reduce the size of the artboards. I not sure about the command to shrink the artboard to fit the page instead I manually enter the size of desired paper format.

I think you try to fit your flow in an A3 size (3508px X 4961px). Then export it as png or jpeg. Then use a photo printing software to print the A3 to A4. Printing an A3 (Word) document on an A4 printer – This is a very old thread but it will help you getting more idea.

This is just a workaround for your problem. Normally in industry, people use tools like Omnigraffle, Axure, Balsamiq etc for drafting and creating networks/flow diagrams. Which by default provides you with an option for advanced printing and page setup to solve the problem of printing. The only problem is, for beginners these tools are very expensive. But I prefer to invest in tools that you are comfortable using.

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