Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
When printing some programs will automatically scale what you see to fit your printer's width. If not, you might only get a portion of what you expect.
My question concerns a problem I have had since day one,Printing! When I print a page words on the right hand side are cut off all the way down the page. My Printer is a HP Business Inkjet2250 an nobody seems to understand why it does this.
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Very frustrating, I know. It's quite common.
The good news is that it's not necessarily your printer. It's more likely to be the program that you're printing from.
And I'll bet that program is Internet Explorer.
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So before I place all the blame on Internet Explorer, if you're using some other program, for example Microsoft Word, then you need to play with your application's printer settings. Typically that would be in the File menu, Page Setup... item. Different applications put it in different places, or give it different names, bit that's the most common.
In there you should experiment with things like page margins, and if the applications supports it, something called "scaling". Scaling, often called "Fit to page", is a way to tell the application to shrink what's being printed so that it actually fits between the margins you've defined.
And there's the rub. Not all applications have the ability to "shrink to fit".
Most notably Internet Explorer. If you print from within the Internet Explorer browser, you pretty much get what you get. You can play with margins somewhat in the Page Setup... menu item, or perhaps try printing in "landscape" (sideways) instead or "portrait". But those are about your only options.
One solution is to use FireFox as a browser. Click on its File menu, and then Page Setup... menu item, and right there on the Format & Options tab is the setting we want to see: Shrink To Fit Page Width. Make sure that's selected, and you should get the results you're looking for.
I continue to run FireFox as my primary browser and am quite happy with it. Flexibility in printing is just another nifty feature that's frosting on the cake for me.
But I'm hopeful that IE 7, when it is finally released, will have a similar feature.
Article C2566 - February 22, 2006
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
I DOWN LOADED A BATCH FILE FOR PRINTING WIDE PAGES THAT WORKS BUT CANT FIND IT NOW...ANY HELP?
ED
Posted by: ED BROWN at April 22, 2008 8:39 PMhi from ireland and thanks so much for your help, i just couldnt remember how to change from landscape to portrait and you solved it in secounds. thanks again for your help
Posted by: melissa at March 4, 2009 7:23 AMA few months ago the same printing problem happened. Thousands emailed hotmail/msn and complained. They were flooded. After about 6 weeks they fixed it. Unfortunately, I lost the email address where I wrote 16 nasty complaints. All were answered by tech support in either India/ Indonesia. Also, as I pay for storage I threatened to stop my hotmail & change my email. (But after 7 years of having hotmail, it will be difficult to change.) I suggest that everyone again flood them with complaints until they fix it. ( One of their suggestions which was unacceptable was to copy & paste.)
Posted by: renee greenberg at April 7, 2009 10:23 PMon page setup change it to landscape BINGO!!!!
Posted by: nando at January 15, 2010 5:45 AMIn IE7 & IE8 you can size most websites for printing very easily. Click the little down arrow next to the printer icon on the toolbar and select Print Preview. If what you see is not what you want, click the down arrow next to the box which probably says "Shrink to fit." Choose "custom" where you'll see the actual percent IE has selected. Just by entering different percentages, either enlarging or shrinking what you just saw in the preview, you can audition for what you want printed. There are few websites you cannot do this with, but most work fine.
Posted by: Lee at March 23, 2010 9:38 AM