Most printers are unnable to print on areas close to the edge of the paper, the need a paper handling margin of typically 3 to 15 millimeters.
When printing PDF files, both PDF viewers and renderers (like in drivers, CUPS filters or printer engines) tend to shrink page content to avoid drawing content in the margin area. Content could be cut off, eventually even printers might be damaged.
When printing labels, this behaviour results in painfully misaligned output.
We tried to optimize the barcode printing PDFs generated by MDA by optimizing the library (see https://jira.clazzes.org/browse/PDFSKETCH-27), but it seems impossible to satisfy all software and hardware out there.
Therefore we collected some hints here:
- Always use a PDF viewer allowing to print without any automagical scaling or moving
- Acrobat Reader (main print dialog) or Evince (on the "Page Handling" tab of the print dialog): Set "Page Scaling" to "None" and uncheck "Auto Rotate and Center"
- Before turning expensive labels into waste-paper, test it:
- print a single page on an equally sized sheet white paper (preferably use a thin paper)
- stack this sheet on an empty sheet of your label paper (or foil)
- hold this against bright light or window and check the positioning