Guide
Why your print comes out cut off
You switched to Actual size, and now part of the page is missing. That is the trade-off working as designed — but which part is missing tells you which of four causes you have, and only one of them is unavoidable.
Diagnose it by what is missing
The unprintable margin
- Looks like
- A few millimetres missing evenly around all four edges, worst at the bottom.
- Because
- Rollers must grip the sheet and the head cannot travel past the supported area, so a band of roughly 3–5 mm is mechanically unreachable — often wider at the trailing edge.
- Fix
- Nothing is wrong. Either accept the margin, redesign so nothing important sits within 5 mm of the edge, or print on a larger sheet and trim down.
Paper size mismatch
- Looks like
- A strip missing from one side or the bottom, and the amount looks like a lot rather than a few millimetres.
- Because
- A Letter document on A4 loses about 18 mm of height; an A4 document on Letter loses about 6 mm of width. The driver prints what it can and drops the rest.
- Fix
- Make the document page size and the tray paper agree. Change one or the other — this is the single most common cause and the easiest to overlook.
The page is genuinely bigger than the sheet
- Looks like
- Roughly half or a quarter of the artwork appears, and the rest is simply gone.
- Because
- At Actual size an A3 page on A4 paper prints the portion that fits. This is the correct behaviour: 100% means 100%, and there is nowhere for the remainder to go.
- Fix
- Choose deliberately — scale it down with a known percentage, print on the right paper, or tile it across several sheets so it stays at true size.
Orientation disagreement
- Looks like
- A landscape design printed portrait, cropped down both long sides.
- Because
- The orientation in the document, in the print dialog and in the driver are three separate settings, and the last one to be applied wins.
- Fix
- Set orientation in the print dialog rather than relying on the document, and check the preview thumbnail before printing.
You cannot have both, unless you trim
Exact size and edge-to-edge coverage are genuinely in conflict on a home printer. Actual size preserves dimensions and loses the margin. Fit preserves the margin and loses the dimensions. Borderless preserves coverage by enlarging, which loses the dimensions differently. There is no setting that gives you all three.
Commercial printing resolves this by printing larger and cutting down — which is the whole purpose of bleed. You can do the same at home: print A4 artwork on A3 at 100%, then trim to size. It costs a sheet of paper and solves the problem completely.
For anything larger than your printer can take, tiling keeps true scale by spreading the page across several sheets rather than shrinking it — the poster splitter does that with overlap and alignment marks so the seams line up.
Frequently asked questions
Why does Actual size print only part of the page?
Because Actual size means the page is sent at 100% with no attempt to make it fit. If the page is larger than the printable area — either genuinely larger, or the same nominal size but extending into the margin your printer cannot reach — whatever falls outside is not printed. It is not a fault; it is the trade-off. Fit to printable area exists precisely to avoid this, at the cost of shrinking everything by 3–6%.
How do I print at actual size without losing the edges?
Print on a larger sheet and trim, which is what commercial printing does and why bleed exists. A4 artwork printed on A3 at 100% leaves generous margin all round; cut to size afterwards and you have a full-bleed A4 at true scale. For anything where both exact size and full coverage matter, this is the only approach that satisfies both.
My document spills onto a second page. Is that the same problem?
Usually not — that is content overflow rather than clipping, and the cause is almost always a page size mismatch. A Letter-sized document laid out to fill the page will not fit A4’s shorter height, so the last few lines move to a second sheet. Set the document to the paper you actually have and the overflow disappears without any scaling.
Would borderless printing solve this?
It removes the white margin but introduces a different problem: most drivers implement borderless by enlarging the page 1–3% so ink overshoots the sheet edge. You gain edge-to-edge coverage and lose true scale, which is the wrong trade for anything measured. Borderless is for photographs, not for patterns, templates or drawings.
How much margin should I leave to be safe?
5 mm of clearance on every edge is safe on essentially all consumer printers, and 10 mm is comfortable if the design allows. Our generated PDFs use a 10 mm print-safe border for exactly this reason — it guarantees nothing is clipped on any common home printer without needing to know the model.
Can I find out my printer’s exact printable area?
Print a full-page rectangle at 100% and measure where it actually stops on each edge. That gives you your real margins, which are usually a millimetre or two better than the specification and rarely symmetrical — the trailing edge is nearly always the worst. Worth doing once for a printer you use for measured work.