Two Aspirin and a Glass of Water!
What's with this silly sub-title?
Unfortunately the current implementation of the "Epson printer
driver" for Mac OS X does not directly support printing images to the
centre of the page. Neither does the driver support borderless prints or
custom paper sizes. So, with these three shortcomings we find Mac OS X
users end up with a headache!
So apart from the Aspirin what can we do to get
rid of the headache?
OK things aren't so bad we do have a number of options and I'll discuss
one in this tutorial. Virtually
all (if not all) Epson inkjet printers are designed to print with a 3mm (approx
0.12-inches) margin on three sides and a 14mm (0.55-inches) margin on
the remaining side (i.e. the trailing edge). As a further aid to demonstrating
the problem I have shown a diagram for a Landscape format page
indicating the margin dimensions. The inner
boundary defines the printable area and the outer the full area of the
page.
Note:
the same margins apply for all media sizes.
Since the printable area is in fact off-centre it should
be pretty obvious from the above diagram that centring an image on a page
isn't going to happen without some help.
Where do we get this help?
The Photoshop
Print-with-Preview dialog has a checkbox labelled Center Image
and in theory this should be our helping hand but unfortunately it doesn't
appear to function in the way users expect. To truly centre the image we need to apply an offset to the
left/top margin when printing. How do we find the value of the offset and
thus the centre of the Page rather than the centre of the Printable
Area as Photoshop seems to be giving us?
The mathematics is simple:
(Right Margin - Left Margin) / 2 = Offset
substituting in the values gives: (14 - 3) / 2 = 5.5mm or 5.5 /
25.4 = 0.22-inches
Realistically very few of us are going to notice or even worry
about 0.5 mm or 0.02 inches and so we can say the required offset is 5mm
or 0.2-inches.
Putting our Offset to Use
Assuming we aren't attempting the impossible and trying to
centre a maximum sized image the above offset value when applied will ensure that
our images are printed at the page centre. Here's how I do
it for landscape format prints:
Step 1
In the above example my Left margin as found by
the OS/Photoshop is 1.5- inches and so
to centre my image I need to add the 0.2-inch offset to this value (i.e.
1.7-inches). However, before we can alter the margin values we must
uncheck Center Image. Once this has been done we
simply substitute our new value into the left margin window and proceed to the next stage in the
printing process.
Step 2
Important: leave Center Image
Unchecked!
Portrait Format
For Portrait format prints we follow a broadly similar
process but this time we adjust the Top margin:
Step 1
Step 2
Note: the initial
margin values are automatically determined in Step 1 and are dependant on the
relationship between "image" size and "media" size.
The offset will be
constant for your printer. Since I've not used an Epson inkjet printer were
the 0.2-inch offset wasn't appropriate you can take it that all the hard work has been done
for you - use 0.2-inches for your offset.
Maximising Image on a Page
Maximising the image on a page shouldn't normally
present the user with a problem, but it seems that it does (at least for
some). OK the feature has moved from Page Setup to Print with
Preview but I ask you "is this so hard to find?" For some the answer
is yes. Surely the term Scale to Fit Media in the Print with
Preview dialog as shown below should be self explanatory.
Before
To be fair I think many of those trying to find/use
Maximise Image are really trying to overcome the centre to the page
issue discussed above and getting into a muddle. Enough of this waffle
................! Simply clicking the Scale to Fit Media checkbox
in the Print with Preview dialog causes the image to stretch and
fill the page, but it will only print within the printable area (remember
with X we cannot print to the edges, yet!). It is also worth noting that
the workaround I discussed above for centring an image on the page is
disabled and so we end up with the unwanted offset all over again (grhhhhhhhhh!).
At time of writing this tutorial there is no workaround for this debacle.
After
Before anyone chirps up and says that we can use Page
Setup to configure custom media sizes and thus eliminate the need for the offset -
I KNOW. I also know that the Epson
Windows and Mac OS 9 driver for many printers allows the users to centre
the image within the page. However, the Epson OS X driver doesn't
fully support custom media
sizes, image centring, etc and short of these issues being resolved Mac OS
X users are stuck with workarounds or an Aspirin overdose!
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