How to stop Apple Mail cut off right side of print and PDF?

I had the same problem with one pesky e-mail. This worked for me.

With an email open, decrease the font size by pressing Command+hyphen (-) once or more until the text appears. Then print or save as a PDF.

If you want to re-enlarge the text, when you go to print, increase the printing percentage (Scale), then Save as PDF. Open the saved file in Preview and delete any blank pages.

I had same problem with some emails from Amazon.com. I found a workaround that is not that awkward:

1 - click on the Redirect button.

2 - print.

It worked for me .

Awesome investigation! Any updates for April 2024?

Yeah, I've been a Senior Advisor with Applecare, with Apple 15 years, and lead genius before that and I've seen this pesky issue with the right margin of PDF's (even PDF files with no relevant association to any printer) do this right margin truncation when an email message is saved as a PDF. I just got a new Mac mini M2, did a clean install, no printer associated yet and if I do nothing but save the email receipt Apple sent me for the Mac mini. It looks fine in the email but if you save it as a PDF it truncates some of the right margin. So it's not some setting or setup config issue with the computer. It's some fundamental issue with PDF's exported from Apple Mail. I've tried everything and I've seen it happen so much I tend to just do a screen shot of the text in the email to get everything to show up on the page.

I can't say for sure if it's every email message I export to PDF (actually just checked nope not every email does it so something related to formatting of the received email message I suppose).

In any case it DOES appear to be something to do with the formatting of the actual content in the email message. THEORY: The message is assembled on the fly with some imbedded HMTL or XML code that is doing something weird for the right margin. I say this because I think it's more prominent when what's saved is a email that was formatted and exported automatically by some backend system. What shows in the message itself looks fine but the PDF get's that truncated right margin thing.

Oh, and I just printed another email from Apple for my new iPhone 15 order out as a PDF and also from a printer connected to my old iMac and BOTH have truncated right margins. In essence only what shows up in the email message itself is a faithful rendering of the message.

So I used another receipt email but this one from Audible that saves to PDF and prints fine with no truncation and then compared the raw message code from the Apple receipt and the Audible receipt and discovered that the Apple content includes a string at the end of the lines being truncated of =20 at the end of the truncated lines of text which translates to a control character of 20/n

UPDATE: So on further investigation I've come to the conclusion that this issue has less to do with how the message is saved but how it was formatted by the sender (see below message sent to AskDifferent)

Some Apple mail client email messages truncate 1 to 2 characters on the right of the message when printed or saved as a PDF. Have tested from a Mac with a printer setup and a Mac that has never had an associated printer with equal results. Playing with printer settings has no effect. Suspect the issue is related to invisible formatting in the raw content of the email message. Issue is more likely to be seen when the email content is generated vs sent from a person. For instance the issue is common for receipts generated by online stores.

I've compared the raw email text content of two different generated email messages (one from Apple and one from Audible) where viewing both receipts in email look fine but the printed / PDF output of the Apple receipt looses 1 to 2 characters from the ends of lines approaching the right margin and the Audible receipt looks fine with no missing content in the PDF or printed version. The possible significant difference may be invisible formatting code inside the received message since the Apple email does have embedded control characters (ie. =20 or 20/n) at the ends of the problem lines and the Audible does not.

Can anyone tell me if this issue (in general) is just one of those things NOT related to how I'm set up to receive email, print email, or save email as a PDF but solely dependent on how the message is formatted?

I've spent a good deal of time trying to fix this issue and have come to the conclusion that, in cases where I can't get a faithful version of the email content printed or saved as a PDF, I need to just do a screen print and move on. I've seen this question come up in the Apple user community online but with no helpful answers or even explanations.

I'll report back if I get any answers that might be useful.

I've never experienced that problem. What printer, make and model, and system version are you using? Also have you installed and run any "cleaning", "optimizing", "speed-up", anti-virus or VPN apps on your Mac?

Give this a try: boot into Safe Mode according to How to use safe mode on your Mac and test to see if the problem persists. Reboot normally and test again.

NOTE 1: Safe Mode boot can take up to 3 - 5 minutes as it's doing the following; 

• Verifies your startup disk and attempts to repair directory issues, if needed

• Loads only required kernel extensions (prevents 3rd party kernel/extensions from loading)

• Prevents Startup Items and Login Items from opening automatically

• Disables user-installed fonts 

• Deletes font caches, kernel cache, and other system cache files

NOTE 2: if you have a wireless keyboard with rechargeable batteries connect it with its charging cable before booting into Safe Mode. This makes it act as a wired keyboard as will insure a successful boot into Safe Mode.

This seems utterly ridiculous in 2023 and frankly an embarrassment for Apple. Imagine if the media caught wind of this?

If you open a PDF generated by Ventura Mail (Version 16.0 (3731.700.6)) in Adobe Illustrator, you can verify that the truncated content is, in fact, included in the PDF. It's just cut off by a clipping path which is smaller than the content. In the case of the email I was trying to print to PDF to a "letter" size document, the clipping path is exactly 7" wide, the equivalent of 1.25" margins on the left and the right. You can delete the clipping mask in Illustrator, but if the PDF contained embedded fonts which you don't have on your system, you will end up a PDF with different fonts. There might be a way to remove the clipping mask in Acrobat (Pro) without messing up the fonts, but I'm not finding it.

Old Toad's workaround (hit "redirect" in Mail and then print from the resulting window) works for me and the resulting PDF even includes the original headers (from:, to:, subject: and date:) which we want to preserve when we are saving emails this way for our bookkeeping.

A less nice workaround is to use Mail's Save as... and save to .RTF, but then you lose a lot of formatting from the original.

You are a genius @VickieTX ! This is the only valid answer for me and it works like charm. It's ridiculous what solutions people have come up with in all the different threads. Once you've played around with printer settings like scaling, paper size, etc., it's obvious that it's not a printer problem. It's more of a problem with how Apple Mail handles HTML content, but I don't really care anymore after learning about this logical and simple solution... 🙏

I did a Print to PDF of the email from Apple that I got regarding your reply and had no issue with margins. I'm on a 2017 Intel iMac running Ventura:

When you say save to PDF are you referring to Print to PDF? When I do a save as all I get are these three option:

I've never had a margin issue with Preview and email messages which I do with the emails from all of my online purchases.

This worked for me too. To view it, you simply need to click the "+" button multiple times to read in larger font. Thank you VickieTX.

for me it was the "CMD" and "-" key pushed once as per @VickieTX's proposal... content got displayed smaller (like usually happening in any browser window) and then content was printed in full width...

I find that, at least sometimes, reducing the size of the margins also works. Also, setting a larger document page size sometimes works. I think that this happens when someone creates a PDF that doesn't take margins into account but most people have some margins by default.

Marode23 and HalZ-50

Thanks for letting me know.

Apple keeps changing things just for the heck of it and making things more difficult