Expert: Glen Demers - 2/21/2011

Question
Dear Glen,

I have a problem with the following. I am designing greeting cards in Illustrator CS4 and printing them myself with a professional photo printer. When I print directly from Illustrator it works fine.
However, when I save my A6 size greeting card as a PDF file and print it out on a A4 paper, the size of the document does not stay the same. The greeting is either enlarged or has gotten smaller than A6 depending on the different options I have tried. Do you maybe have an answer on my problem?

Thank you in advance!
/ Frieda

Answer
Hi Frieda,

I'm assuming you're placing the pdf's in InDesign to print them out. In the print dialog box go to Setup and in the Options section make sure scale is set to Width 100% and Height 100%.

If you are printing out of Acrobat, make sure that Page Scaling is set to none.

If you're trying to print multiple cards on a sheet, create a new document A4 size and put guides on it to show the printer margins. The printer margins should be in your printer documentation. Then place multiple cards on this sheet and position them inside the guides. The Print Thumbnails option is for printing many small versions of InDesign pages and InDesign will automatically reduce, enlarge, or rotate pages to best fill the sheet with the amount of thumbnails asked for.

Hope this helps,
Glen Demers
Prepress Technician, Best Printing Online
www.bestprintingonline.com

For more InDesign tips please visit our help pages here: http://www.bestprintingonline.com/indesign.htm