Saturday, January 23, 2016

print design - Two-sided printing: exact positioning?


I have designed some fancy cards (80mm x 48mm), and I would like to print them on both sides of a sheet of paper now (5x2 per A4 sheet).


Naturally, both sides of the print need to coincide exactly. However, after several attempts, it seems it's not working as expected: my printer seems to impose extra margins which mess up the alignment (which makes the printed area of the front side no longer coincide with the printed area of the back side). I already tried adding 1-2mm extra on all sides to allow some fluctuation, but this turns out to be insufficient. The difference seems to be always in the same direction, but strangely, moving the images around doesn't seem to change much -- as if the printer automatically corrects this.


So I wondered, are there any good ways to do it? In the PDF, things are aligned very well, but the printer messes it up with more than 2 mm difference. Any idea what would cause this and how to avoid it?
(For what it's worth, I'm using Windows 7 (pro, 64bit) and my printer is a Samsung CLP-325.)



Answer




I found the solution. Apparently my PDF program had an option "auto-center" to remove imposed printer margins. When I turn that off, the positions are moved quite a bit away from what they should be, but at least now they respond consistently to moving the images around on the paper. It's now printing with the 2mm margin correctly (with a fluctuation within 2mm, that is). Nevertheless, thanks all for the input! :-)


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