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Printing is not to the margins listed


Robby Poole

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I recently bought a new printer. A Brother HL-L3230CDW  printer. The Apple website showed it worked with AirPrint.  

I had an HP printer (HP M451DN - Laser jet Pro 400 series), that got to the point it would not print certain fonts from my music program accurately using AirPrint. I had to switch to the HP driver, which has begun to fail me with macOS Big Sur. So I took the plunge to get a new printer. 

The issue I have, is the page margins do not print correctly. Using the new Brother HL-L3230CDW, I have a document in Publisher with 0.25" margins all the way around the outside edges, and the inside edge has a margin of 0.5". The 0.5" is a little large, and the 0.25" is a little small. Almost as if the page is not centered. I understand that I did not buy a "professional" printer. But I would think the page would be a little more accurate than this. 

Am I missing something? Or is this a bug in software? Especially since the HP seemed to be a lot more accurate with the margins.

 

Robby

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Hi @Robby Poole I'm sorry to see you have having some issues with your new printer. I've experienced a similar thing when getting a new printer before and it can be very disruptive to your workflow.

Can you try a couple of things for me please?
1. It sounds like your printout has moved slightly to the right. Can you tell me if your top and bottom margins are accurate?
2. Are you printing directly from Publisher, if so could you try exporting as PDF and printing from Preview or Adobe Acrobat?

I have found that my laser printer has offset print margins no matter what software I print from so checking this is a good place to start.

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Thanks for helping me!

1.) Top, left, and right are off. Bottom is harder to tell, because nothing I have so far goes right to the bottom margin. But I am suspecting it is a little high.

2.) A PDF still prints with the margin the same as the document printed from publisher.

Robby

 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Robby Poole said:

2.) A PDF still prints with the margin the same as the document printed from publisher.

Can you clarify whether the PDF itself has the wrong margins? If the PDF is correct on-screen, but it prints incorrectly, then we know this is a printer issue unrelated to Publisher. If the PDF itself is incorrect, then we know this is unrelated to printing, and so we could start considering how the document is set up.

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Thanks for the update Robby. A good way to see which margins are off would be set your margins as before and then draw a light grey box to fill the whole area up to the margins. This will show you where all of the margins are.

My laser printer is out on all sides. It is offset to the left and up by about 2mm. I've learnt to try and compensate for this when I create a new layout. 

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That was a great tip! Thank you very much! What I find very odd...... Right, top, and bottom print the correct margins, but the left margin is out by a 1/16 of an inch, to 1/32 of an inch. It depends on the mood of the printer perhaps.  Examples are below.

For my personal daily use this is not an issue in the slightest. In fact, I never use margins this close to the edge for my personal stuff and about 95% of any other work I might do. However, this is a project I am working on for someone else, and these margins are somewhat necessary to achieve the desired look in their book. 

I guess what I am worried about  is determining whether this is an issue in Publisher or an issue with my printer (3 of the 4 sides spot on, while 1 is out doesn't provide me many clues). If I export the PDF for the client, and they take it to a print shop, will they experience similar issues at the print shop?

I am not new to the world of printing and publishing, as I have helped this client many times in the past with other books (music books). But by no means am I a professional, and by even less means do I truly know and understand what happens at a large commercial print shop. This project is a MAJOR overhaul of a book we published 20+ years ago. And many things are being updated and fixed from the errors before. We are trying to create an as near perfect copy as possible, as this will be the last time this book ever gets an update. I just want to know that the margins will be correct on the other side of the process.

If using larger margins, an error this small becomes undetectable to the normal reader. However, when using smaller margins, an error this size is a much larger percentage of the distance and can be detected. And in the end, that is what I trying to avoid.

I would appreciate any thoughts on this matter.

 

Robby

IMG_0200.HEIC IMG_0201.HEIC IMG_0202.HEIC IMG_0203.HEIC

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@Robby Poole We can see what was printed, but without the document we can't judge whether what was printed matches what was intended. I suggest you share a cut down version of your .apub document and an exported PDF to go along with those images of the printed results.

We still need to get to the heart of the issue: does Publisher export a correct PDF, and does that correct PDF print with incorrect margins. I suspect now that is the case, but we don't have the info necessary to confirm it. All we have is the printed results, but we don't have the steps along the way that would indicate where the undesired result occurred.

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Here is a cut down version of the document.

It "appears" publisher exports a correct PDF. I'm on a mac, so I don't have any means to measure the margins in Preview. However, the PDF stills prints with the slightly misaligned outside margin for the spread.

 

Robby

Book Printing Problem.afpub

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Thank you for trying to hanging with us on this. The demo file you sent looks to me to be set up just as you intended. If indeed the PDF exports with the correct margins, then you can be sure you that the document you send to the printer (print shop) will be correct.

It is possible that you have some sort of offset activated in your printer software, but it should not be on by default, and I have a feeling if you had set it, you would have known about it and would have looked there already. Since we are talking about only 1/16 an inch, I think we are just dealing with the imprecise nature of the printer. As it feeds the paper into the machine, it can't be exactly perfect. In fact it is normal to expect some slight variation from one print to the next. (But if you haven't already checked, it wouldn't hurt to make sure the paper guides are accurately set.)

We have a small in-house printing operation ourselves, of which I am the operator, and although I am a stickler for good margins (and I have even had the servicemen over more than once to fix such issues on our machine), 1/16 inch variation is within tolerance for our equipment (which is neither what the big printers are using nor the home printer variety).

I have some limited experience using outside printers for when we need perfect-bound books, which we do not have the capacity to do in-house, and it seems there is a certain amount of tolerance that they expect to be built into the design. Usually the print shop would give you some indication of how much bleed to build into the design, and how much of a safe margin to expect due to variation. Even on the big machines, there could be some variation as the paper is pulled into the machine at high speeds, but more than that, quite often the image is printed onto larger paper and then trimmed in a cutter, and there would be some slight variation due to the cutting. If you are dealing with a book, such as with perfect binding, then you can expect there will be some cutting, and so be aware of some need for slight tolerance.

Some of the other folks on the forum may want to corroborate or correct me on dealing with the outside printers, but I think that a small amount of variation would be normal. In general, you would want to plan your design in such a way where the cut may be off by a small amount and it still look good.

Anyway, for your part, if the PDF that you send to the print shop is accurate, then any kind of offset your home printer creates will be unrelated to the results that would come from the pro printer.

I hope this helps rather than confuses. One thing you could try is open the exported PDF itself into Publisher (since it can import PDFs as workable documents) to check whether the margins are still as you intended. I think if there is a 1/16th variation in the PDF itself, then you should be able to identify it in Publisher.

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Thank you VERY much for that detailed answered.

Under normal circumstance, this 1/16 of an inch would be irrelevant, except that 1/16 on an inch with a 0.25" margin is 1/4 of the space. I usually run 0.5" margins (1/8 of the space difference). So this isn't an issue most of the time. 

I very much appreciate you looking into this for me. And taking the time to help answer some questions. I honestly did not know that there was a "tolerance". Like I said, I am not new to the publishing or printing world. But getting this deep into things like tolerances are things I never had to think of before. And quite frankly, I've never done a project with this close of a margin where I would even notice if things weren't correct. I normally just export to PDF, then send away..... never thinking twice about the other side.

Anyways, thanks to both of you for your help. You have given me a lot more to think about for future projects (and possibly this one) when it comes to margins.

 

Robby

 

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Hi @Robby Poole I've checked the border on your PDF and it has exported correctly. The tolerance mentioned by @garrettm30 is the same thing printers refer to when they talk about bleed. I converted 1/16 inch to mm and it is 1.5875mm so is within the margin allowed for bleed so not anything to worry about. 

My brother works for a local printers down the road from where I live and they usually suggest 3mm of bleed all round. Then you do not end up with untidy edges. Your printer will be able to advise you of this also. 

I took a look at the manual for your printer and it has a manual feed slot which is best method to use to get the most accuracy when printing:
- https://support.brother.com/g/b/faqend.aspx?c=ca&lang=en&prod=hl3070cw_all&ftype3=1971&faqid=faq00002919_001

The reason why the manual feed slot is more accurate is that the paper has a more direct route through the printer and travels round one-less roller. Even when using the manual feed slot you can still get a certain amount of movement during printing and it can vary with each print as you suggested earlier. It's a good idea to get to know the tolerance of your machine so you know which documents to print yourself and which ones to send to a professional printer.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Create say, an A4 portrait page with 10 mm margins all round. Show margins. Add a rectangle with a 1pt border that fits to the margins. Add a small text box near the top of the page with the word ‘Top’ in it. Print this page then turn it over with ‘Top’ at the same orientation as it came out, and then print on the reverse. Hold  it up to the light and if the images don’t line up exactly (in printers parlance, ‘backup’), the fault is in the printer. The reason for ‘bleed’, trade standard 3mm, is when an image needs to print to the edge of the paper there is an area that allows for folding and guillotining issues, but the pages will still ‘backup’ correctly as above.

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