Six divisions, each with its departments beside it, ran off the edge of
the sheet. The cause was structural, not cosmetic: every level spread
horizontally, so width multiplied with depth. Six divisions times three
departments is eighteen boxes across a landscape A4 — about two
millimetres each, if they had fitted at all, which they did not. They
overlapped and were clipped at the margin.
Now only one level spreads sideways. The divisions stand in a row and
everything below them hangs lengthwise off a vertical line, so width is
the number of divisions and nothing else. Depth costs height instead,
and on a landscape page height is what there is to spare.
What still overhangs is scaled down as a whole. The sheet in the preview
now carries the print area's exact dimensions rather than growing with
its contents, so the fit is measured against the real page: what you see
is what the printer gets. If a sheet has to shrink below 55% to fit, it
says so and points at A3, instead of quietly producing something nobody
can read.
With names switched on, each department gets its own sheet — a whole
division with every name was never going to be legible on one page — and
long name lists set in two columns so the box grows sideways rather than
pushing the scale down.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The chart on screen is an infinite canvas: you zoom in, drag around, and
look at one corner at a time. Paper has none of that. Printing the canvas
means scaling 850 people onto one sheet, which yields boxes two
millimetres wide — technically the whole company, practically nothing.
So the print view is rebuilt rather than shrunk, and it does two things
the canvas cannot.
It asks before it prints. Depth (bereiche, abteilungen, teams, or teams
with every name) and which divisions, each one selectable. Whoever needs
Produktion for a meeting gets two sheets instead of forty, and the page
count is on the button before anything reaches the printer.
And it draws the hierarchy as a hierarchy: boxes joined by connecting
lines, not a column of cards. Superior and subordinate are the entire
point of an org chart; a tidy list of the same units simply does not say
it. The lines come from borders on pseudo-elements, so the PDF keeps
them as vectors and they stay sharp when someone zooms in. Header
shading gets weaker with each level down, which survives the black-and-
white printer that most of these end up on.
Overview sheet first, then one sheet per selected division, each
carrying its own heading and headcount so page seven is still readable
on its own. A4 or A3, landscape.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
