Fit / Shrink to Printable not working

[joe_l]

Printing a 297x172 mm document scaling with fit or shrink to an A4 paper on a HP Color Laserjet Enterprise M751 does nothing. Yes, it prints, but it does not scale. Latest firmware and driver for the printer is installed.

Basic stuff I would expect from layout programmes. I know the workaround exporting to PDF and printing from a PDF reader, but I dislike the extra workflow step.

[PaulEC]

Fit to should work, shrink to won't do anything as your original is smaller than the size you are printing to. Could you post a screen grab showing your settings in the print dialogue?

[joe_l]

Of course. Image attached. The red dotted line indicating the printer margins only appears from time to time and not always.

[PaulEC]

I can't see why this shouldn't be working! The only thing I can think of is that there are some printer settings overriding the app settings. You could try checking the printer properties. 

[Wosven]

Did you checked the properties to see if A4 is selected?

And does the scale percentage value is different depending of the selected option? Since it should fit to the paper, it shouldn't stay at 100%, isn't it? 5I don't have a printer to do some tests currently)

[PaulEC]

6 minutes ago, Wosven said:

Since it should fit to the paper, it shouldn't stay at 100%,

When you set to "fit to printable" the scale percentage is greyed out. As I understand it, it is used to set an exact scale, so you would leave the setting on "scale" then set the percentage of scaling you require. eg: "Scale" - "141%".

[joe_l]

48 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

You could try checking the printer properties.

No matter what properties are changed, Fit to Printable does not work, even for other printers and even after a reset of APu.

[Dan C]

Hi @joe_l,

Sorry to hear you're having trouble!

This would usually indicate that the application is having trouble correctly communicating with your printer driver - can you please try uninstalling the driver, restarting your PC and then reinstalling the latest version direct from the manufacture, then try printing once again for me?

Many thanks in advance

[joe_l]

27 minutes ago, Dan C said:

This would usually indicate that the application is having trouble correctly communicating with your printer driver - can you please try uninstalling the driver, restarting your PC and then reinstalling the latest version direct from the manufacture, then try printing once again for me?

Uninstalled driver, restarted PC, installed latest driver == still not working. In the meantime I use a scale value or export / print via PDF reader.

[Wosven]

2 hours ago, PaulEC said:

When you set to "fit to printable" the scale percentage is greyed out. As I understand it, it is used to set an exact scale, so you would leave the setting on "scale" then set the percentage of scaling you require. eg: "Scale" - "141%".

From memory some apps or drivers were giving you the percent in the old days...

[PaulEC]

1 minute ago, Wosven said:

From memory some apps or driver were giving you the percent in the old days...

You're right! Many apps do display the new scale percentage, I'm not sure why it's different in APub.

[Dan C]

4 hours ago, joe_l said:

Uninstalled driver, restarted PC, installed latest driver == still not working. In the meantime I use a scale value or export / print via PDF reader.

Thanks for confirming that for me and I'm sorry to hear this!

It's certainly interesting that the scaling options are working, but 'Fit to printable' is not - are you able to provide a sample of this .afpub document here for me?  

[joe_l]

14 hours ago, Dan C said:

are you able to provide a sample of this .afpub document here for me?

Sure. File attached.

fittoprintable.afpub

[PaulEC]

I think I know what the problem is here and I should have spotted it earlier. The long side of this document is the same as the long side of an A4 page, so it is actually fitting it to the page.

The question is, if you print smething narrower than A4 on an A4 page, what do you want/expect it to look like?

[joe_l]

15 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

so it is actually fitting it to the page.

Maybe I am getting the term "Fit to Printable" wrong, but for me a printable area would be where the printer is able to put colour on. This means for me, that for a printer not capable of borderless printing the printable area would be here A4 - 4,233 mm on each side. Just to add: Printing an A3 to A4 with "Shrink to Printable" is also not working for me.

[PaulEC]

If you fit an A3 document to an A4 sheet of paper it should fill it, because they are both the same size ratio. However, if you want to fit a document that is a different ratio to the paper (i.e. your document onto an A4 sheet) there is bound to be a blank area each "side" of it. I'm afraid I'm still not sure what else you would expect to happen when fitting a narrow document onto a wider page.

 

[joe_l]

20 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

I'm afraid I'm still not sure what else you would expect

Then the wording is wrong. Instead of "Fit to Printable" it should read "Fit to Paper". Or like in Acrobat or Foxit or else where the print engine respects the margins of a paper that could not be printed on when you use this option.

[PaulEC]

So, is the problem that, when you use "fit to printable", you lose part of the image because it is not taking into account the unprintable area at the edges of the paper? (It does seem, as Dan C indicated, that there is a problem with the app getting margin information from your printer.)

[joe_l]

14 minutes ago, PaulEC said:

you lose part of the image because it is not taking into account the unprintable area at the edges of the paper?

Correct. I should have said this right from the start I think.

[PaulEC]

20 minutes ago, joe_l said:

Correct. I should have said this right from the start I think.

Sorry, I originally thought the problem was that your doc was not filling the whole page.

Until you/Serif can discover why the app and printer aren't talking to each other, I think the best work around, as you have found, is to manually set the printer margins, rather than relying on "fit to printable". ("fit to printable" seems to work OK for me, but, obviously, I'm using a different printer!)

[Dan C]

Thanks for the further information, I now certainly understand the issue you're reporting here and I've been able to replicate this here - therefore I'm getting this logged with our developers now