Why are prints from Preview cut off at bottom of page

Question

Level 1

16 points

Why are prints from Preview cut off at bottom of page

When I print a PDF from Preview the print has about 3/4" cut off the bottom of a portrait document or from the right of a landscape document.. When I print the same document from Acrobat Reader, it prints correctly. I use Page Setup before printing. The scaling in the other direction seems correct which makes the cut-off a mystery.

I prefer Preview for PDFs as it is much faster than Acrobat Reader. The cut-off prints have caused me grief when I have not detected them. What is going on here?

iMac, Mac OS X (10.4.11)

Posted on Jan 24, 2008 3:30 PM

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Answer 1

raffenet

Level 1

14 points

Apr 14, 2008 9:16 AM in response to Cliff Pain

I have the same problem and can confirm it also happens in Leopard. There was traffic on a similar Leopard issue printing landscape to Windows shared printers that was fixed in 10.5.2, but it doesn't seemed to be solved for my situation (printing to CUPS shared printer). Note that it seems to be a bug in the way Preview creates a PDF for printing, since Adobe Reader works fine, and "lpr <filename>" from the command line will also work.

If you have any more info since you posted, I would be interested.

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Answer 2

BDAqua

Level 10

250,259 points

Apr 14, 2008 12:37 PM in response to Cliff Pain

I think the problem is preview not taking into account the Page Margins.

The workaround should be in Page Setup, make a Custom Paper size in Portrait & Landscape for the size sheets you need, and most likely set the Top & Bottom Margins on Portrait to 0.125, and same for Left & Right in Landscape.

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