Printing in the middle of the page

[Roger Nye]

I am printing some slides with Powerpoint 2003 on A4.
They print touching the left paper edge with a double-
width margin on the right. Also the top margin is much
narrower than the bottom.

The paper size in Page Setup is set to A4.
The paper size in the printer settings is A4.

How can I get it to print with even margins?
So far my only workaround has been to print to Adobe PDF
and then print from Acrobat.

Thanks
Roger

 

[Guest]

Hi Steve,
I don't think the printer has a borderless option.
It is a Hewlett Packard inkjet and it has to grip the
paper somewhere.

It is giving a nice margin of about 3/4" (2cm) on
average, which would be fine, if it were evenly
distributed, not 0" & 1.5".

The margins work fine with Word and Acrobat with their
default printer settings. In fact, I can export the
slides as images in Word and they print fine, although
resizing and positioning them is laborious.

Surely there has to be a way of adjusting the positioning
in Powerpoint, isn't there?

Thanks
Roger

 

[Echo S]

Unfortunately, printing is definitely not PPT's strong suit. (Do I win the
"understatement of the day" award?)

Steve cooked up a little workaround using the notes pages. Maybe it's worth
a shot?

http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00097.htm

 

[Roger Nye]

Thanks for the thought, but when I tried the Notes Master option, it put a
white rectangle in the slide area, even though I had deleted all the fields
on the Notes view.

I have to give up on experimenting now and get on with the job and so will
use Acrobat instead.

It is good to know that I am not missing anything obvious here, although
frankly I am amazed. It seems so basic.

Best regards
Roger

Unfortunately, printing is definitely not PPT's strong suit. (Do I win the
"understatement of the day" award?)

Steve cooked up a little workaround using the notes pages. Maybe it's worth
a shot?

http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00097.htm

 

[Sonia]

My HP printer does have a borderless option that is intended for photos, but
gives weird results with PowerPoint slides. Try the following:
1. Open PowerPoint and your presentation
2. Go to File > Print > Properties
3. Click on the Layout tab. Look for the Borderless Printing button.
4. If you find it, click on it and in the next dialog *uncheck* the box next to
"Make this my default".

 

[Roger Nye]

Hi Steve and Sonia,
I have checked and:
(i) My printer does not have a borderless option; and
(ii) The driver is the latest on the HP web-site.

If it were the printer settings or the driver though, I do not see why only
Powerpoint would be affected.

I have printed the slides to a PDF format and printed them from Acrobat and
this worked very nicely. Perhaps Microsoft should license the PDF writer for
their software.

Thanks for the suggestions.

Regards
Roger

My HP printer does have a borderless option that is intended for photos, but
gives weird results with PowerPoint slides. Try the following:
1. Open PowerPoint and your presentation
2. Go to File > Print > Properties
3. Click on the Layout tab. Look for the Borderless Printing button.
4. If you find it, click on it and in the next dialog *uncheck* the box next to
"Make this my default".

 

[Roger Nye]

I just tried Powerpoint Print Preview (which I hadn't been using before). It
shows a pretty accurate picture of what it is planning to print - all shifted
over to the left side of the page.

So it is not that the printer is doing something strange. It is doing
exactly what Powerpoint is telling it to do.

Regards
Roger

 

[Roger Nye]

It's an HP Officejet G85.

A reasonable conclusion, but not necessarily a correct one. PowerPoint bases what it'll
do at print time at least in part upon what the printer driver tells it. Naturally it
replicates that as closely as possible in the print preview, else the feature'd be of
little use.

If the printer driver hands it bad information or PowerPoint somehow misinterprets the
information it's handed, then both the printout and the preview will likely be wrong.

It may well be that PPT is bungling the job, but the odds are that it's in the driver or
elsewhere, else we'd have heard this same complaint a lot in the past. That's not the
case.

You might check to see if there are other drivers available for the printer; try
installing one from your Windows CD if it's available, for example. What exact printer
model is this, by the way?



--
Steve Rindsberg, PPT MVP
PPT FAQ: www.pptfaq.com
PPTools: www.pptools.com
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