Print Ready Chart Preparer
Preparing a chart for a trade journal entry or a forum post usually means manually turning off the grid, hiding volumes, switching to a white background, zooming in, taking a screenshot, then remembering to undo every one of those changes afterwards. Forgetting the last step is the common failure - the live trading chart stays styled for print until someone notices. This script does the whole sequence in one run: it reads the chart's current grid/volumes/background/foreground/zoom settings, applies the print-friendly versions, waits briefly for the terminal to actually repaint, takes the screenshot, and restores every property it touched to the exact value it read at the start - not a guessed default, the chart's own prior state. Because a Script runs once and exits, this capture-apply-shoot-restore sequence has to happen in a single call; it does not offer a separate "restore later" mode, since there is nothing for a second run to safely resume from other than the chart itself, which is exactly the state a restore step needs to trust was undisturbed. Candle and bar body colours are deliberately left alone - a print that still shows bullish/bearish colour is more useful than an all-black silhouette, and this tool's job is clearing clutter and the background, not a full colour scheme redesign. Notes and limitations MQL4 has no chart-wide font-size property, so "enlarged" is achieved via CHART_SCALE (the same zoom levels the toolbar +/- buttons drive), not a literal font size increase - candle spacing and axis text both scale up together. If the terminal window is minimised or off-screen, ChartScreenShot can fail; the script still restores the chart's style in that case and reports the failure rather than leaving it styled. The brief Sleep before the screenshot is a pragmatic wait for the redraw to finish, not a guaranteed synchronisation primitive.
Script · MT5 · v1.0 · Free
About Print Ready Chart Preparer
Print Ready Chart Preparer is a script for MetaTrader 5. It can alert you with a pop-up, sound, email or push message. It has 9 settings, such as File name, Shot width and Shot height. MQL source code included.
Files in the download: PrintReadyChartPreparer.ex5, PrintReadyChartPreparer.mq5, PrintReadyChartPreparer.txt.
Settings
| Setting | Default | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| File name | PrintReadyChart | Screenshot filename (no extension, saved under MQL5\Files) |
| Shot width | 1600 | Screenshot width in pixels |
| Shot height | 900 | Screenshot height in pixels |
| Hide grid | true | Hide the price/time grid |
| Hide volumes | true | Hide the volumes sub-window |
| Hide object descr | false | Hide object description labels |
| Background | clrWhite | Print background colour |
| Foreground | clrBlack | Axis/text colour on the print background |
| Scale boost | 1 | Chart zoom levels added for the print (CHART_SCALE, clamped 0-5) |
How to install
- Download the ZIP from your PolyMaria library and unzip it.
- In MetaTrader 5 open File → Open Data Folder, then go to MQL5 → Scripts.
- Copy the .mq5 file(s) there. Put any .mqh files in MQL5 → Include.
- Open the .mq5 file in MetaEditor and press Compile (F7) if MetaTrader does not show it.
- Drag the script onto a chart to run it once.
Tags: Grid · Volume · Alerts · MT5 Script · MQL5 Source Code