Printing landscape PDF: wrong margins

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trg818

Printing landscape PDF: wrong margins

Post by trg818 »

Hi,
I had posted a related question in the Software forum but got no replies, so I'll try again here...
I am puzzled by a problem that arises when printing a landscape PDF file from my Linux machine on a HP DeskJet 930C. The document itself is created on my Mac with latex, the PSutils, and ps2pdf and prints correctly when sent to the same printer from the Mac. When printing from my Linux machine (Maya/MATE, software always kept up to date), however, either the right or left margin of the landscape printout lacks something between 0.5 and 2.5 mm, i.e. the text is cut off, and the margins are not equal; the details depend on the programs used and the printer and paper settings. Moreover, the whole page image is shifted towards the bottom of the landscape page by about 1 cm in the printed output; this happens independently from the program used for printing (tried evince and acroread) and is not visible in the print preview.
I have checked the printer setup in both programs as well as the system-wide configuration GUI. In all cases I use auto-rotation and no scaling (just as on the Mac), and the margins are set to 0, as they should be. For paper I tried both A4 and "A4 small margins"; the latter yields a result that is less bad but still flawed.
So I'm at my wit's end. If the PDF, which is by definition meant to be portable, prints perfectly well from my Mac, why doesn't it do so from the Linux box?
Thomas
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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DrHu

Re: Printing landscape PDF: wrong margins

Post by DrHu »

trg818 wrote:For paper I tried both A4 and "A4 small margins"; the latter yields a result that is less bad but still flawed.
I usually use A4 paper size as well, but it is not exactly the same as letter size (USA), so the minor print positioning could be incorrect because of this
http://betweenborders.com/wordsmithing/a4-vs-us-letter/

Or you do use A4 sized paper in your printer and the problem is elsewhere
--although pdf files should of course just work and print a'right, even though it uses paper sizing as well

Working the paper sizes to fix..
https://www.phy.ornl.gov/computing/CUPSPrinting.html

http://xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/lan ... on/single/
https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... ps-766115/
--possibly checking the PPD file, if you have one and the paper sizing, as an example in the above link..
trg818

Re: Printing landscape PDF: wrong margins

Post by trg818 »

Thanks for your suggestions.
The media size (A4 vs. Letter) is not the issue; I have set A4 everywhere, and as I said, the same file prints correctly from the Mac.
Some of the links you gave made me try to print the intermediate postscript version of the file (the latex file is compiled via dvi and ps and only then converted to pdf with pdf2ps for technical reasons) instead of the final pdf in order to exclude loss of margin information in the pdf2ps step. As expected, the ps version comes out wrong as well; otherwise it shouldn't have worked on the Mac either, I guess. I also tried to force a margin by giving an option -o bottom-margin=72 to lpr when printing the ps version from gv, but it showed no effect.
So I still think it must have to do with the printer drivers. The printer is a HP DeskJet 930C, and the driver information is as follows: "PPD-Adobe 4.3, created by CUPS PPD compiler v1.5.3, hpcups 3.12.2", if this is of any help.
Thomas
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