Control print output

I am very happy with the way my article came together with bike. Near 4300 words in just a moment it felt like, but the output to PDF is disappointing. The font is oversized and the outline format almost seems exaggerated by the indent depth. Is there anyway to control the margins on the page? I am using the resizing on screen to make the font size more acceptable, but the current margins seem larger than an inch. If there were anyway to control the indent from 5 spaces to say 3 that too would be nice.

Thanks for your tool Jesse, have a good week (If you read this on a Monday as it was sent :wink: )

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The font is oversized and the outline format almost seems exaggerated by the indent depth

The macOS printing system is a bit of a mystery to me, many options, I’m not really sure how they are all supposed to work. With that said I think I have some of the basics working my test is:

  1. Setup Pages.app with Bike’s default font System/SF Pro and font size 14pt. Type some text into an empty Pages document at that size, and print, and open PDF into Preview.

  2. Do the same thing in Bike, reset to default typography. Enter some text, and print, and open PDF into Preview.

When I do that both PDFs have the same margins and text sizes. Now in the case of Bike the text width is a bit less because if the indent in the left to show the row handle, and the matching indent on the right, to balance the whitespace.

So generally Bike should be printing like pages, except for that extra side indent.

With that in mind if you want smaller printed text you can use View > Text Size > Zoom Out and you should see a smaller font used. It an be a pain… but you might want to zoom all the way out for printing, then zoom back to a better screen size for editing.


I’m working on Bike 2, and one of the big features provided by Bike 2 will be stylesheets. They will give you much more control on how the outline looks, and also offer a way to make the outline look one way when displayed on screen, and then you can choose another stylesheet to use when printing. I think that would fully solve the problem for you, but … still working.

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