Chopping off sides of print out

[td4stage]

I am teaching a class in basic VW and am having a trying time with some students and their printing problems. Most of the projects are on Letter paper in the landscape orientation. This is what I have them do:

1. Go to Page Setup / Printer setup to confirm "Letter" & "Landscape".

2. I usually have them select "One Printer Page" from Printable Area.

3. I have them confirm that the pages are 1 Horizontal and 1 Vertical. Then they "OK" out of setup.

4. Go to Print and select "All", then "OK".

Now when a couple of the students print, both short sides of the drawing do not print...only losing the border. When I print (from my machine) their exact same drawing to my printer using the same procedure it prints fine! All of the kids have their own laptops and their own printers and most have no problems. I have told these few with problems to try and update their print drivers. I believe the problem kids have VISTA...everyone else is XP Pro. The program (VW 2009 student sp2) is otherwise working fine. I hesitate to have them do anymore as I don't think they are particularly computer savvy.

Any help would be appreciated!

Pat

[CipesDesign]

Hi Pat, not sure if this will actually help, but perhaps if they print/save to PDF first they will be able to check the size, registration, etc. prior to wasting paper... Could be worth a shot...

[td4stage]

Thanks Peter!

I'll give it a shot!

Pat

[Pat Stanford]

It sounds like a Letter vs. A4 problem, but you have already checked that.

Are they printing using a generic printer driver instead of the printer specific one? The generic drivers/PPDs often have very large margins built in so the border could be outside of the PPD margin, but within the printers actual printable area.

[CipesDesign]

There is also the old trial-and-error method to determine the actual printable area of your printer, especially as it relates to VW's. Open a drawing and set up the page, size, etc. Then draw a rectangle just barely within the extent of the page (as shown by VW's 'show page boundary' checkbox, in the Page Setup dialog). Then print the page and see whether the entire rectangle is actually printed. If not, you can then adjust the rectangle (a few times as req'd) until it does. Then save this VW's file as a template so that you will always have it as a reference.

Note: this shouldn't really be necessary, but sometimes might be the only reliable method.