Word: How to find out your printer’s printable area
March 10, 2011I was interested in this official Microsoft Word blog post on using WordPad to find out your printer’s printable area: http://blogs.office.com/b/microsoft-word/archive/2010/09/03/print-borders-without-problems.aspx.
However, the information provided in this post didn’t work for me in WordPad on my Windows XP computer, nor on my Vista laptop.
Instead, I tried something similar in the various versions of Word that I have and I was able to see the minimum margins that my printer requires.
Here’s how:
- Open a new Word document.
- Go to page setup:
- Word 2003: File > Page Setup
- Word 2007 and Word 2010: Page Layout tab > Margins > Custom Margins
- Set all margins to 0.
- Click OK.
- You’ll get a message saying the margins are outside the printable area (the message may vary slightly depending on which version of Word you’re using). Click Fix.
- Your printer’s margins will now populate the margin fields.
[Links last checked March 2011]
Why does this not work for Adobe Acrobat PDF printer of Acrobat X and Word 2010?
Adobe PDF printer driver allows 0 size margins.
Therefore the warning message “…outside printable are” will not occur for Adobe PDF Printer
But printing form Word 2010 to the Adobe PDF printer results in the “famous” error message that margins are outside the printable area.
Any ideas?
Dieter
i cannot print borders from this printer HP Deskjet 3050 series j610…even adjusting the margins to 0