How to print a 5 x 7?

I have been using Aperture for about a month and have
generally figured out most things including how to
print 4 x 6's. However I can't do 5 x 7s. I
set the Paper Size option to 5 x 7 but when I set
the "Layout Options, Scale To" to 5 x 7, I get a
photo that is something like 4 x 6. Perhaps this
is because the border is set to the minimum of .56
inches. However it cannot be set any lower.

What printer do you have?

One option is if you have a borderless printer a an option to select for printers, try selecting that and then the border option vanishes and "fit to page" really fits to a 5x7 as close as it can. This works with my Epson R800.

You'll have to crop the picture to get a 5x7 -- the height/width ratios are different.

6/4=1.5
7/5=1.4

I'm sorry, but that is not intuitive at all. Apple needs to provide a "crop and resize" tool such as that in PSCS2. You should be able to crop an image to a specific inch size or pixel dimension at a specific ppi. This is not optional, it is mandatory.

I'm sorry, but that is not intuitive at all. Apple
needs to provide a "crop and resize" tool such as
that in PSCS2. You should be able to crop an image
to a specific inch size or pixel dimension at a
specific ppi. This is not optional, it is mandatory.

The crop tool does allow you to specify a custom ratio - like 5x7.

If you are printing in Aperture you don't need to do anything more as long as you can print borderless and select the proper paper size.

As for exporting a picture at a particular DPI, that is trickier - it would be nice if as an export option you could specify an absolute size in inches and DPI and have Aperture resize the image to match. Currently you can specify a percentage larger than 100% but that's not really practical to use if you do a lot of cropping to different sizes.

So at the moment after export you can do the batch resize/reDPI if you like. In the meantime submit feedback via the Aperture page. There are a lot of other people who have requested being able to set DPI on export so I think we'll see something along those lines.

I did just did a quick check and got similar results - using a custom paper size only gave the 'fit entire image' or 'fill entire page' option with the other options greyed out. As soon as you pick a preset size the options come back. 😟

Ian

I have been using Aperture for about a month and have
generally figured out most things including how to
print 4 x 6's.

Well, you are way ahead of me. I can't do 4 x 6's yet. What's your trick?

PowerMac G5 2 x 2.3 GHz Mac OS X (10.4.6) Epson SC 900

I am not sure that Epson will do what you want done. I'm using an R800 and there are certain limitations built into the printer software itself, so you can't necessarily blame Aperture here.

Instead of cutting up 13x19 paper, why not do your 5x7s on 5x7 paper (borderless or with a chosen border), or, as I do them, on 8 1/2 x 11 with or without crop marks.