Printing at 100% results in not-100%-sized output

[SimonBanton]

While working on some vector illustrations that are drawn to specific physical dimensions (eg a 25cm long line), I've discovered that the printer is actually producing output at approx 98.5% size when told to print at 100%.

ie: if Imeasure the 25cm long line on the output it's actually only 24.6cm long.

To try and see what was causing this to happen, I tried printing from a variety of different packages and all have the same issue. I then checked for firmware upgrades for the printer and brought it up to date, and upgraded the printer driver to the latest available version as well. None of this has made any difference.

This may seem like a trivial discrepancy (4mm in 25cm), but when creating an illustration that will be output on tiled A3 pages to a large size (approx 5m x 7m overall), the resulting 1.5% shortfall ends up being very large (10.5cm in 7m).

 I think I've had enough experience in printing stuff out over the last 30 years (some of it in the reprographics industry) to be confident I'm not misconfiguring print options, and I have the necessary tools to be able to inspect the internals of a PDF document to check that a line drawn at 25cm long is actually 25cm long within the file.

Have other people encountered similar issues with this printer or others in the range? If so, did you find a solution or is it something intrinsic to the printer's design that it's incapable of producing 100% output to the correct scale?

Finally, is there any way to contact HP directly by email to raise this issue with them?

Thanks for any input.

S.

[ShlomiL]

Hi,

Borderless printing (edge-to-edge) is only available on select paper types such as Card or Photo Paper, not on Plain Paper, due to technical limitations of the hardware and the lack of an option to print till the edge of the paper on thinner media without damaging the media.

You may find the printer specifications below, see the Paper-handling specifications > Paper size options

---

• Small margin: Used for single page printing for boarderless card and photo paper
  https://support.hp.com/ca-en/document/c0361834

[SimonBanton]

I'm not trying to print borderless, I'm trying to print at 100% of the drawn size within the available print area of an A4 or A3 sheet.

The example I gave was a 25cm long line, which is well within the printable area size of an A4 sheet. I have also tested this with smaller sized drawn objects with the same result (eg a 10cm square comes out as a 9.85cm square when printer told to print at 100%)

S.

[ShlomiL]

What is the size of your original document?

What application are you printing from?

If the original size is A3 and you try to print it on A3 paper as an example, you would need to print it as Borderless to save the exact size and ratio as the original, else the added margins will reduce the original size to match the printable area.

[SimonBanton]

As an example, I'm printing an A4 PDF from Preview on OSX at 100% onto A4 inkjet paper. Borderless isn't available as an option unless I print on Photo paper.

I just knocked up a quick test page which was a 10cm square centred on an A4 portrait page and saved as PDF. When printed, the square's side length in the long direction was compressed to 9.8cm whereas the square's side in the width direction was correctly 10cm.

I would have hoped that anything on the page within the printable area would be printed at the designed size in both dimensions, and that anything that ran outside the printable area of the page would be cropped. What seems to be happening is that there's some scaling going on that I have no control over.

Thanks for your replies so far, appreciated.

[ShlomiL]

Hi,

such settings relies on the used application too, what application are you using to print the PDF from? E.g Adobe Reader, Preview, Chrome?

[SimonBanton]

The image was drawn up in LibreOffice Draw and exported to PDF from there. It was then pre-flighted using Adobe Acrobat with the Measuring tool installed to check dimensions of the elements on the page and confirm that the media and crop boxes in the PDF were the correct size for A4.

The application used to actually print the PDF to the OfficeJet was Preview on OS X with Scale: 100% (not Scale to Fit: "Print Entire Image" or "Fill Entire Paper") to A4 paper.