Printing from Designer

[Washishu]

I recently decided to establish the print area of my desktop printer when printing from Desgner. I created a simple A4 image extending the full length and width of A4.

Although a relatively new user, I'm sure I must have printed from Designer before, but I have never studied the print dialogue closely.

I printed my test file at each of the three scaling options: Scale (with the scale shown as 100%); Fit to printable; and Shrink to printable.

Excluding very small differences (0.5mm) which might be attributed to movement of the paper during transport or the fact that this is not a precision-engineered device, there is no difference at all between these three settings.

I would expect the 100% image to be cropped—which it was, giving left/top/right/bottom margins of 2mm, 2mm, 4mm, 14mm respectively. And the image depth was cropped to 281 mm, the width to 204 mm.

I would expect Fit to printable area to scale the image to fit within these margins. There was no visible or measurable scaling of the image—bar the small differences mentioned, it was exactly the same.

I'm not sure what I would expect from Shrink to printable that would be different from Fit to printable. And there wasn't any—this also gave exactly the same result as the first print.

So the point of the three different settings is…?

[MickRose]

Hi @Washishu - I think it is a known issue that "Fit to printable" and "Shrink to printable" don't work. As to your point as to why use Shrink and Fit options, I wonder if the "Fit" option is for enlarging.

[Catshill]

I struggle with Affinity Designers printing function so I tend to export to pdf and print from that for more reliable results.

[Washishu]

22 hours ago, MickRose said:

I think it is a known issue that "Fit to printable" and "Shrink to printable" don't work.

Thanks for that info. Mick. I wasn't aware of that. Seems like a major issue that would need dealing with. After all, some form of 'scale-to-fit' has been a feature of every single software application I can recall having experience of—and certainly all the ones I have now.

2 hours ago, Catshill said:

I struggle with Affinity Designers printing function so I tend to export to pdf and print from that for more reliable results.

Now that I know, I shall do the same.

[Callum]

As far as I'm aware fit to printable and shrink to printable should just scale the document to fit the page size defined by your print driver at this point in time there is a known issue with these features ignoring printer borders but this shouldn't prevent the feature from working altogether.

Thanks
C