Kim,
Sadly, the maximum printable area of each printer model seems to be slightly different. The margins that are left over are determined by the printer driver and some user input, but it’s not always straightforward. Generally, as you have reported, the bottom margin is larger, to allow for paper feed issues. It’s not really an Elements issue, but a printer issue. Perhaps if we know your printer, someone with a similar printer can give you some help.
🙂
Brent
Brent:
Thanks for responding. I’m using an HP Deskjet 970CSE Professional Series. I agree it must be a print driver issue as when you preview the document it appears perfectly centered. Hmmm … wonder what would happen if I took the canvas size from 8" x 10" to 8" x 10.5" … would the bottom margin still be larger or might it even things out? I just don’t want to skew the whole document by changing the canvas size.
Kim
See Brent’s follow.
That’s about right for many inkets…
My HP has a .46 unprintable margin on the bottom (which is added to whatever border you already may have planned).
Mac
If you already have image exact size you want, then you can either futz with canvas size as you mention or…
In Print Preview, you can manipulate the top of page offset.
Mac
… I agree it must be a print driver issue
And no, it’s not a driver issue…it’s a mechanical one.
Mac
Kim, I’m going to copy/paste a post I did several days ago when someone else with an HP was having trouble getting an image centered. It may be helpful. Or not.
"Those of you who are not able to center will probably have to resort to doing what I did and what several other users have done. We created a simple "dummy" document that could be printed on plain paper and experimented with margins until we were able to account for the no-print zone.
Create a new blank canvas that’s 8 X 10, or whatever size you want to have centered on letter sized paper. Set it up at any resolution you want, but with a transparent background. Once the new canvas is open on your desktop, select the entire thing using either Select>All or the keyboard shortcut of Command (Mac) Control (Win)>A so you have marching ants around the entire perimeter. Next go to Edit>Stroke. Set the Stroke at somewhere around 20 pixels, to be printed inside. Click OK. You now have a blank rectangle of the exact size of an image.
Open Print Preview and set the margins manually. On my HP, I have to have the left margin quite small (minus .25 sticks in my mind, but I don’t have my cheat sheet handy), and I also had to juggle the top margin. The manual with your printer should tell you the size of the no-print zone, so with a little math you can figure out what adjustments have to be made. It also helps to measure an image that’s off center and calculate what those margins should have been based on the amount it’s off. Run the sample through your printer, adjusting the margins until you’ve got a formula that makes it come out perfectly centered. Make a note of the numbers and manually set the margins whenever you want to be sure something is properly centered. A pain, yes, but it takes almost as long to explain as it does to do, and you only have to fuss around with it once."
Brent/Mac/Beth:
Thanks for all the helpful suggestions. I thought about doing what you said Beth, but my goal was not to have to recreate the page since it is a composite of so many photos cropped to different sizes … so I futzed with the canvas size and took the length up to 10.5" and kept the width the same. This gave me an open area above and below my existing page and since I already knew the bottom margin was going to be off I simply moved all the photos down until they were flush with the bottom of the page. I did have to adjust the whole page, but at least I didn’t have to reinsert all the photos and crop them all again.
This was the first time I used PE2 to create a page from scratch so I didn’t anticipate running into the printer’s margin capacity being exceeded and/or adjusted. I will have to make sure I use the steps Beth posted before I attempt this again. Thanks to all of you again!
Kim
Kim, you didn’t need to do anything with the canvas/image you’re trying to print. All you need too do is figure out how to set the margins manually by creating a dummy 8 X 10 rectangle. The goal is to get any given sized canvas printed with proper margins on the sheet. I did several samples early on and made notes for a number of different canvas sizes.
