Font Size and Color and Printing Parameters with Arduino IDE

I am on my first Arduino project and am using the Arduino IDE, as provided, V 1.0.5-r2. I found how to change the font size in the menu. I should point out that a restart or the IDE does not seem to be necessary, as stated on that window.

After some difficulty, I found how to change the default window size in the "preferences.txt" file. I thought making the window wider would be a good idea. Until I tried to print my program, at least. When you print the program/sketch, any increased width is totally useless as it just cuts it off.

My questions or suggestions:

  1. The colors for the various elements in the display and printout leave a lot to be desired. Except for the actual commands, which are a nice black, variable names are a pale red and the comments are practically invisible. I would like to know how to change these colors. Or if there is no way, I would like to suggest that one be provided.

  2. Printing! As I said above, I increased the window size so I could use longer comment lines. I like to use generous comments. But after a certain point, around the original default window width, the lines are simply cut off and the second half of most of my comments just disappears. It is still in the file, but I can not print it. I had to go back and convert those lines to shorter ones.

On top of that, I have changed the font size to 16 to make it easily readable on my laptop, which I am using for programming. When I printed with that text size, the text on the printed page was enormous and even more of it was cut off on the right. I was forced to return to using a font size of 10 to bring this under control. But then the printed text was unreadable without a magnifier AND it only occupied about the upper left 1/4 of the printed page. The rest of the page was wasted and text continued on another sheet. A FULL THREE FOURTHS of the pages were wasted with white space. So, I then had to adjust the magnification of the printout to bring it back to normal size.

Is there any way of adjusting these parameters so the IDE acts more like a normal program as far as the printout is concerned? If not, then I would suggest that it be added. I would further suggest that changing the colors and fonts and font characteristics (bold, italic, etc.) be given first consideration in this.