printing outside browser cuts off top and bottom of page

[Warren Block]

On Wed, 25 Aug 2010, Chad Perrin wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 08:33:34PM -0700, Chip Camden wrote:
>> Quoth Warren Block on Tuesday, 24 August 2010:
>>>
>>> It appears that PPDs are stored in the reasonably-named
>>> /usr/local/etc/cups/ppd.  There's a PPD for the LJ4050 in
>>> print/foomatic-db...
>>>
>>> And it has
>>>   *ImageableArea Letter/Letter: "12.24 12.06 599.76 780.06"
>>>
>>> 12-point margins on that printer sound about right.
>>
>> Mine had 18 and 36 for the first two (for an OfficeJet 7310).  I tried
>> doubling them but that didn't seem to make a difference.  Did I need to
>> restart something to get that to take effect?
>
> I suspect those correspond to the margin settings in GtkLP, but fiddling
> with those settings has zero observable effect on printing.

Applications should be able to get those values from the PPD.

The PDF in question has a top margin of 18 points, a bottom margin of 21 
points, and a printed area height and width of about 576 and 755.  It 
fits within the printable area of most lasers, and prints fine on my 
LJ4250.  The bottom will be cut off on a lot of inkjets due to their 
paper feed.

For another test, use pdf2ps and feed the PS output directly to the 
printer, bypassing CUPS.  If the LJ4050N Ethernet is connected (and it 
really should be), you can use nc something like this (untested):

   # pdf2ps test.pdf - | nc lj4050hostname 9100

If that has cut off margins, it's a setting within the printer.
If it prints fine, it's CUPS.