Cytobank – As the cell flows

PDF Enhancements in Cytobank

May 5, 2012 at 7:21 am Angela Landrigan Leave a comment

On Cytobank, you can download the Illustrations you’ve built with our Print View and PDF tools. These are useful for generating figures for publications, printing for your lab notebook, and keeping a local copy of your Illustrations.

Our latest additions to this functionality include the ability for users to change the page size of PDFs such that large illustrations are no longer truncated horizontally.

Here is an overview of the changes:

Page formatting options

You can now select among a range of paper size options for PDFs, including three fixed-size options that constrain the page dimensions if you’re looking to print your plots (Letter, A4, and Poster) and two auto-fit options that scale the width and height of the PDF to exactly fit your document dimensions. The difference between the two auto-fit options has to do with limitations imposed by Adobe Acrobat Reader software, which will only open documents that do not exceed 200 inches in either dimension. So, if you plan on generating very large arrays of plots and want to use Adobe Acrobat Reader to view the PDF, you’ll need to select the “Very Large” auto-fit option, which inserts page breaks every 200 inches. If you do not want page breaks in your PDF and can use alternate software such as Adobe Illustrator to open your PDF, then choose the “Infinite” auto-fit option. With every page formatting option, if you choose a plot size and type combination that exceeds the width of the page format you have selected, an orange warning box will appear on the PDF generation page asking you to select a format with larger dimensions or to alter your plot size.

Name your PDF

After clicking to download a PDF of your saved illustration, you are now redirected to a page where you can specify the name of the PDF that will be generated. This will help you find and organize your local files, and save you the step of having to rename them on your own computer. As always, PDF generation occurs in a separate browser window so you can continue to navigate around Cytobank if you are waiting on a particularly large PDF to be created.

Customizable plot size

The plot size you specify in the Working Illustration is now translated to the print view and PDFs. So, if you choose 128 pixel plots in your working Illustration, your plots will be 128 pixels wide in the print view and PDFs. You can choose plot sizes ranging from 64 pixels to 512 pixels wide.

Gating hierarchy display mimics the view in the Working Illustration

Previously, plots in the gating hierarchy displayed as a vertically stacked line of plots. The gating hierarchy in Print View and PDFs now mirrors the layout seen in the Working Illustration, with plots horizontally stacked by hierarchy and vertically stacked by population, more efficiently using page space when many gates are present.

Header redesign

The overall look of PDFs has changed, with a clean header featuring the Cytobank logo and your experiment’s QR code in the upper corners, and a table of experiment details under the Illustration title.

View our Release Notes for a detailed list of recent PDF improvements. As always, email us if you have suggestions for how new PDF features could improve your experience.

- Angela

Entry filed under: Cytobank. Tags: A4, auto-fit, Cytobank, gating hierarchy, header, improvements, infinite, letter, paper size, PDF, plot size, poster, very large.