Exporting charts as PDFs and some image formats, using third-party software

Stock chart offers a built-in "export as image" feature, however it is quite slow and exports charts as a bitmap image only. If you don't need this functionality to be public, and use it only for your own needs, you can use third party software such as PDF Creator to export charts as vectors or bitmap images. This will make the exporting process much faster, and having charts as vectors will allow you to produce high -resolution prints without losing quality.

First, you should download and install PDF Creator (it's free). It is installed as an additional "PDFCreator" printer. Restart your computer to complete the installation.

Now, open the web page with your chart in Internet Explorer (unfortunately this does not work in Firefox). If you need a bitmap image, you can use the browser’s "print" function (press Ctrl+P). In a popup window, select "PDFCreator" as your printer and click "Print". Another popup window will open, where you can enter a filename and some other information. After you have finished, click "Save". You should get a PDF file with your chart as a bitmap image.

To export the chart as a vector image, you should right-click somewhere on a chart, choose "Print" and then do the same as described above. There are two things you should know when exporting the chart as a vector image:

1. Transparency and gradients are not supported (the chart will look as if all alphas are set to 100);

2. You should set the chart size in your HTML to the original or less than the original size of the SWF file, which is 520px width and 400px height. Otherwise your chart may be cropped. This is done in the following line of your HTML file:

var so = new SWFObject("amstock/amstock.swf", "amstock", "800", "600", "8", "#FFFFFF");

PDF Creator offers a lot of ways to export content - you can have vector PDF, EPS, PS or bitmap TIFF, JPG, PNG, BMP and PCX images.

This is not the only way to do this. Here is a good resource for information about it: http://www.joshuadavis.com/workshop/print/

If you check the page linked above, you will see that you can do this on a Mac too, however you'll have to downgrade the Adobe Flash player to v8, as for some strange reason the export to vector functionality stopped working in v9.