Well, here's an easy way to test the margins:
1. Apply a page border to every page (Format | Borders and Shading).
2. In the options, set the border to From text 0 pts and deselect "Surround
header" and "Surround footer."
This will give you an outline of the margins you have set. Print several
pages, back to back if you will, and see how well they line up. My tests in
this way would tend to confirm your conclusions. I tested twice, and the
second time I ran one page back through the printer to see how well it would
print the same outline over itself; the registration of the same border
printed twice was quite precise compared to the back-to-back match, which
suggests that it is not the printer feed that is the issue.
I think that the problem is more fundamental, and has nothing
particular to do with Word.
Note that printer alignment is critical if you are doing manual
duplexing and you want double-sided printing to match on the front and
back of the page.
Imagine that your printer is aligned such that everything is printed
1/32nd inch too far right, and you have set left and right margins of
one inch. Each page will print with the left margin at 33/32nd inch
and the right margin at 31/32nd inch. When you place the pages back to
back, one of the pages has left and right margins swapped, so the
margins are mis-aligned by 1/16th inch.
(A "real" duplexing printer usually is designed to flip pages top to
bottom rather than the left to right of manual duplexing, so the
alignment problem shifts to up-down.)
If your printer has a way to adjust left-right alignment, you can use
it. Word could fix it for your specific printer if it had a "margin
alignment" feature that added a settable amount to the side margins
for odd pages and subtracted it for even pages. A printer driver could
offer the same feature, but it would have to know which were odd pages
and which were even. You can do it manually by manually changing the
inside and outside margins between printing the odd and even pages.
Bob S
