Problem printing borderless PDF w/ Snow Leopard + Acrobat Pro 9 + MS Office

In testing your issue I don't think the issue has anything to do with Acrobat. It has more to do with the printer selected in Word's Page Setup.

For my test I created a borderless docx by setting the margins to 0mm for all edges. I then opened Page Setup and ensured that I had a printer selected that could do borderless (such as my Canon MP980). In Page Setup this showed A4-bordeless for the paper size. With this saved I selected to print, again with the MP980 selected as the printer and then selected PDF > Save as Adobe PDF. Once the document was distilled I then had an A4 PDF document with full bleed.

I then did the test again, this time selecting a laser printer that does not support borderless printing. While the Print Layout view still showed the image at full bleed, selecting File > Print Preview showed the smallest of margins around the image. And of course when I selected to convert the document to Adobe PDF, the resulting document had the same small border.

So I think that you may need to adjust your Page Setup in Word to ensure you get your borderless print.

And btw that article does not say that SL and Acrobat 9 print engine is incompatible, it states that they couldn't add the PDF writer as a printer proxy so they added the function to the PDF button. All the functionality is there as before, you just don't have the virtual PDF printer...

Pahu

ozxx wrote:
Using OX X 10.6 (Snow Leopard), that's now impossible because Snow Leopard is incompatible with the Acrobat 9 PDF print engine. (See this article: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/509/cpsid_50981.html )

This is a Snow Leopard problem, so Apple must be responsible for the solution.

Don't believe everything Adobe tells you. One of their favorite pastimes is blaming their bugs and limitations on Apple.

The authors of the free CUPS-PDF virtual printer were able to made the trivial modifications necessary for the new security features of Snow Leopard. Ergo, it must be Adobe's fault.

CUPS-PDF is free software so you are limited to the page sizes that it gives you. You can hack up the PPD pretty easily. I just did in about 2 minutes that to verify I could print a borderless PDF from Office 2008 and CUPS-PDF. If you tell me what borderless page sizes you need, I could post a PPD for you to use with CUPS-PDF. If I were Adobe I would charge you $299 for that. Since I'm not, I'll do it for free 🙂

ozxx wrote:
I use US Letter and A4 page sizes frequently, but have been known to use other sizes as well. A custom hack would be great, thank-you.

Download CUPS-PDF from the link above. Download my PPD file with borderless A4 and US Letter from: http://etresoft.org/opensource/PostscriptBorderless.zip

Copy the PPD file somewhere convenient on your system. Go to System Preferences > Print & Fax > + (to add a printer).
Select CUPS-PDF. In the Print Using pop-up, select "Other" and choose my PPD file. Click the Add button.

Now when you print to CUPS-PDF, you will be able to select borderless A4 and borderless US letter. Your PDF files will show up in /Users/Shared/CUPS-PDF/<your user account>/

Although the underlying issue still remains.

That Adobe's PDF Printer doesn't work? Yes. I agree.

(To be honest, I think both of the companies should be working on solutions as urgently as possible as it's disrespectful to their long-term customers.)

Again, I agree. While I am certainly biased towards Apple, in most cases (and especially this case), it is Adobe that needs to get their act in gear. Snow Leopard was released over a year ago. Adobe had pre-release copies long before that. Their PDF printer still doesn't work. Some random guys on the internet (the authors of CUPS-PDF for MacOS X and me) were about to make the 5 minute (no exaggeration!) changes required to produce a functional virtual printer for Snow Leopard. Why can't Adobe?

Feel free to forward that to Adobe 🙂 http://www.adobe.com/bin/webfeedback.cgi

There is actually a really easy fix for this problem without installing new borderless printers.

If you are in the document and go to page setup, click the page size drop-down menu and select "Manage Custom Sizes". Here you should be able to create a new page size (say A4: 21 x 29.7 cm) and set the non-printerble area to be "user defined" and then set all of the dimensions to 0.00.

With this setting you should be able to create pdf's with no white borders.

Etresoft, thanks so much for your insights. I'm facing a similar problem with some legal documents that our staff are converting to PDF. Being legal documents, they're crammed with text that goes very near to the edge of the pages. This text frequently gets cut off, depending upon what printer the user printed to last. My current work around is to have the user install a bogus IP printer using an Epson driver that supports borderless printing, then select that printer prior to using the PDF button, but that worflow is very kludgy. I like the CUPS-PDF solution much better.

My question is, do you know of a source for PPD files that support common borderless formats? We're in the U.S., so I need U.S. style page sizes (*****, legal, ledger, etc.). Any leads you have would be fantastic.

Dear etresoft
I found the thread regarding borderless PDF printing since I am facing the same problem. Somehow I am not able to locate/select CUPS-PDF when adding a printer, hence I am stuck in solving my problem.
Would you have any hints?
Cheers,
jspr