Document printing: an exact-size file for your printer

Because the driver shrank it. A printer does not put ink right up to the edge, and the “fit to printable area” mode — on by default in many drivers — shrinks the page by three to five percent. The file this tool makes is already the size of the sheet, so in the print dialog it is enough to choose “100%” or “Actual size”, and the printed ruler lets you check it. If the driver shrinks it anyway, enter how many millimeters the scale measured under “Your printer” — the sheet is enlarged by exactly that difference.

Choose “Poster” and set how many sheets across. The height follows the picture’s proportions, and the preview shows the poster assembled: a grid of tiles numbered A1, A2, B1… Neighboring sheets overlap for gluing (10 mm by default) and carry cut marks. If the photo has too few pixels for that size, the tool tells you how many dots per inch it will have on paper.

Choose “Several per sheet” and a number — 2, 4, 6, 9 or 16. The sheet orientation is picked so the pages stand upright and come out as large as possible. For receipts, boarding passes and labels switch on “Actual size”: the pages land on the sheet in their own millimeters instead of being stretched to the cell.

Choose “Two-sided — By hand”. The job splits into a fronts stack and a backs stack: print the first, flip the stack, print the second. The right order and rotation depend on how your printer stacks sheets and how you flip them, so a two-sheet test finds out both and remembers the answer.

You flipped the stack along the short edge while the file expected the long one, or the other way round. Run the two-sheet test and tick “the back is upside down” — after that the back pages rotate to match how you actually flip.

It fell into the strip the printer cannot reach: the rollers that pull the paper take a few millimeters at the edges — about 4 mm on most lasers and up to 12 mm at the bottom on inkjets. The tool checks the built sheets and marks in red those where text enters that strip; “Fit the printable area” shrinks them by exactly as much as needed.

Coverage is measured as soon as the sheets are built: the number sits next to the Print button, with details under “Ink”. Compare it with 5%: that is the coverage cartridge yields are declared at under ISO/IEC 19752 and 19798, so a document at 15% empties a cartridge about three times faster than the box says.

Open this page on the phone, add the files — including HEIC shots straight from the iPhone camera — and tap Print: the system dialog opens with AirPrint or Mopria printers. On an iPhone printing goes through Share → Print. You can also save one finished PDF to send it on or take it to a copy shop.

Turn on “Clean scan” under “Ink”. The shadowed background of a photo prints as a gray fill, and the printer lays ink on all of it — coverage comes out at 25–45% instead of 5%. Cleaning evens out the lighting across the whole sheet: the paper turns white, the text dark, a blue stamp stays blue. The result shows in the preview before printing; printing the cleaned file itself is part of Premium.

Photograph each side or spread on a dark background and add both photos. The tool finds the edges of the document by itself (or press “Crop to the document” under the photo name), straightens the perspective and prints each side at actual size — 85.6×54 mm for a driver’s license or bank card, 176×125 mm for a passport spread. Two copies go onto one A4 sheet; set the scale to 100% in the print dialog.

It is laid out into pages in the browser — with the page size, margins and headers set in the document itself — and each page is placed on the sheet as an image at the chosen resolution: 150 dpi by default, which is what a laser printer resolves. PDFs are different: their pages are carried over as vectors, so text in a PDF stays text.