I’ve been looking around the internet for advices on how to use XMind’s printing features without any success. XMind is a great platform-independent mindmapping and brainstroming tool, but when it comes to exporting your graph to some kind of vector-based file format, it seems you are left alone. There is an advanced feature in the commercial Pro-edition called PDF-export, however, it merely creates a hi-res image of your map instead of those 96dpi in the freeware edition. That Pro-feature is even buggy as bigger maps get cut off, and in the end you have to deal with a really big graphics file.

Now it is possible to install a PDF printer driver, and use the normal Print-feature, printing to the PDFCreator’s printer. You’ll get a nice looking PDF based on vectors. But as soon as you want to print bigger maps you will discover ugly looking inaccuracies:

Figure:silhouette effect when printing a bigger map with 600 dpi on a letter-sized page.

The reason for this is that Xmind is always printing to one paper size (this could be letter, for example) with maybe 600dpi. In order to fit bigger maps onto a letter-sized-page, the contained text is scaled down which effectively comes along with a reduction in quality.

My solution here is to increase the page size, or the page’s resolution. As far as I know, such an option is only available with PDFCreator’s printer driver: Go to Printers & Faxes, rightclick PDFCreator, select Printing Preferences, click on Advanced, and on Graphic/Print Quality you can select a resolution higher than 600dpi, for example the maximum of 4000dpi.

You may try to tweak another driver’s output page to a larger size, though in most cases this isn’t possible. Even on my Mac with Snow Leopard’s fine Print-to-PDF-feature, I couldn’t convince the driver to output with a higher resolution or size. So this is a Windows-only solution at the moment.