Printer’s scale (slightly OT)

J
Posted By
john
Jan 4, 2004
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385
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1
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This might be a silly case due to my expectations, but I have an engineering drawing that I wanted to transfer to wood so that I could trace it using a scroll saw, so I printed it on an economy inkjet printer with the intention of cementing the print to the wood. The scale came out about 2mm wrong.

Are printers supposed to print to exact 100% scale, or are they like copy machines which used to intentionally skew scale (presumably to defy copying of currency) ?
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JC
J C
Jan 5, 2004
On Sun, 04 Jan 2004 17:23:29 -0600, (jjs)
wrote:

This might be a silly case due to my expectations, but I have an engineering drawing that I wanted to transfer to wood so that I could trace it using a scroll saw, so I printed it on an economy inkjet printer with the intention of cementing the print to the wood. The scale came out about 2mm wrong.

Are printers supposed to print to exact 100% scale, or are they like copy machines which used to intentionally skew scale (presumably to defy copying of currency) ?

Here’s the thing… what is the size of the image? And what is the maximum printable area that your inkjet is capable of?

If either the length or width of the image is bigger than the printable area, then your print driver is probably set as "fit to page" and this is automatically shrinking the image so that it fits on the page.

Check that.

Because every printer I’ve ever used will print dead on accurate.

— JC

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