"Chuck Snyder" wrote in message

Pete, I'm glad you used the word 'almost' - I have several photo apps that do the same off-center thing with my clunky HP multipurpose unit. After several unsuccessful attempts to correct the situation, I've learned to

live

with it, using a variety of ways to trick the printer - or I just get out the paper cutter at the end and center it the old-fashioned way.

Well, it's really hard to diagnose the problem without actually seeing what's going on. There's "off-center" and then there's "really off-center". The original poster wasn't very clear, but I *think* he's saying that not only is the image not centered, large areas of it aren't even on the paper. That's a different problem than seeing the whole image, but not getting it exactly centered on the page (which is, in fact, not really so much a problem as a basic limitation of the printer technology).

One thing I haven't seen mentioned yet is that many printers do not have a centered "printable area". This is very common on ink jet printers, where there's more unprintable margin at the bottom of the page than the top, due to the way the paper feeds through the printer.

If you tell Elements to scale the image to fit the page, it will scale it to fit the *printable* area, not the whole page, which is as it should be. That's the best Elements can do, and it maximizes the use of the portion of the page that the printer driver presents to Elements. But the printout won't be centered, using the default printer settings.

Now, some printers allow the user to adjust the behavior of the printable area. All of the Epsons I've used (three, since the Stylus Color 600) have provided a checkbox in the printer settings that center the printable area on the page. The way the driver does this is simply by trimming the top part of the printable area to match the bottom part. You get slightly fewer pixels and a reduced printable area, but it means you won't have to do as much math to get the printout actually centered on the page if that's what you want.

The Epson 2200 I just bought has an additional checkbox, called "Maximize Margins". This checkbox *expands* the printable area on the bottom of the page to match the top. The only downside to using this checkbox is that, depending on the type of paper and what you're printing, the image quality at the bottom of the page may suffer, because the printer can't get as much "traction" holding the paper in place when printing there.

Like I said, I can't tell from the original post whether the person is suffering from some drastic problem, in which the image not only doesn't center, but is greatly offset from the page, resulting in cropping of large areas, or if he's just experiencing the normal non-centered ink jet printable area. But the latter might be something to consider.

Pete

John W Mitchell

Replied in the following topics

Page Layout Troubles