Printing a VI or Saving a VI as a pdf

[F.N]

I am currently working on an interface as part of a university project. Since Labview does not allow me to zoom in/out, I wanted to print out the VI. The computer with labview installed on it does not have a printer so for me to print, I would have to convert it to PDF and print elsewhere. Is this possible or not?

[MrHappyAsthma]

I do not know of a way to get a PDF of your VI.  But why not just use the PrintScreen button and then copy the picture of the VI into a paint program and crop out everything but the VI?

[jcarmody]

Printing VIs

[johnsold]

Printing a VI has been possible since very early versions of LabVIEW. Recent versions give you many options, including saving the documentation to file,  as Jim pointed out.

Lynn

[F.N]

the problem with this is that it does not fit in one window so this will require a lot of editing. My problem is that the printer is installed on a computer that doesnt have labview so I would have to save the VI in another format to be able to access it from the computer connected to the printer

[johnsold]

This will be an issue regardless of where the printer is connected.

If one of the requirements for a program is printed copy, then the front panels and the block diagrams should be designed with that requirement in mind.  This will likely result in front panels which do not fill the screen. A generally beneficial side effect is that it will force you to use subVIs to keep the diagram size constrained.

Lynn

[Yamaeda]

Install e.g. CutePDF which is a software printer to PDF-files, then print as normal.

/Y

[Norbert_B]

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@F.N wrote:

[...] Since Labview does not allow me to zoom in/out, I wanted to print out the VI. [...]

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Honestly, this is one of the most unfavorable reasons for printing out an image of the block diagram.

To be precise: Printing images is only for documentation purposes. So it is expected that the VI(s) are finished and i want to provide information on the code to someone who doesn't have LV or doesn't have sufficient knowledge about LV so i can use the image(s) to point out specifics of the code.

That being said, there is nearly always an issue with LV code:

You most often don't see 100% of the code in a single glance on the code, so a single image. The reason are most often structures like case/event which only show a fraction of the code (only a single case of x) and subVIs.

It would be the same if you'd print out C-code with a significant number of cases/functions collapsed.....

All in all, the print VI tool together with a PDF printer should perform quite as you like as seen in previous posts....

Norbert

[Larry.C]

Hi F.N,

I recently created a VI which adds to the "Report Generation Toolkit" from national instruments and uses the Microsoft PDF Generator to create the PDFs. If you look through the report gen toolkit you will find setting up a word/excel report including the FP image is quite easy. Once you have done this download my VI from here:

http://www.viresource.com/news.html

Stick this on the end and vuala! PDF Generated 🙂

Hope this helps!

Kind Regards,

Larry

[F.N]

Does this change the actual VI into a PDF or does it change data generated by the code?