Can’t center image on HP 1115

Well, Larry, you do what others of us HP owners do (I have a 1215) – you run some test sheets and note what kinds of manual corrections you have to make to the top and left margin in order to get a large print centered on the page. I know that’s not what you wanted to hear! 🙂

To set up the various margin adjustments on mine, I opened up new Elements docs of the sizes I wanted to center (8 X 10, 8 X 10 1/2, 7 1/2 X 10, etc.) I did a Select>All, got the marching ants, and then I did a Stroke of about 25 pixels. Then I printed on plain paper, making adjustments until I got each centered. When I got a good one, I noted the adjustments for left and top, wrote it on the page along with the size, and put it in the Elements notebook.

HPs are the worst among all the printers for failing to center. There’s another recent thread in which this is discussed, and it seems that the HP drivers and Elements have some kind of communication problem. Epsons seem to be the most likely to center properly (most do and only a few don’t) and Canons are unpredictable. Several of us have been complaining about this for quite a while. Adobe says it’s an HP issue, and HP says it’s an Adobe issue. It’s a standoff, and us HP owners are left up a crik!

Thanks Beth. You’re right, its not what I was hoping to here but it does seem like a good way to get a fix on it.

"Beth Haney" wrote in message

HPs are the worst among all the printers for failing to center. There’s another recent thread in which this is discussed, and it seems that the HP drivers and Elements have some kind of communication problem. Epsons seem to be the most likely to center properly (most do and only a few don’t) and Canons are unpredictable.

As I mentioned in the other thread, ink jet printers almost always require a little extra effort to center images on the page, because of the asymmetric printable area.

Just for grins, I downloaded the HP printer driver for the 1115 and 1215 printers. I verified that, indeed, the HP 1115 and 1215 do not have symmetric printable areas. They can only print within 1/4" of the left and right sides of the paper, 1/16" of the top, and just under 1/2" from the bottom.

Unfortunately, it turns out that the HP printer driver does NOT have a setting to enable centered printing, the way that the Epson drivers do.

My guess, without being there to actually see what’s going on, is that the centering is only unpredictable when one isn’t aware of the issues regarding printable area on ink jet printers. I do not believe that there are any "communication problems" going on with respect to this issue.

In Elements, you can see the "entire page vs printable area" difference in the Preview dialog. Where the print preview is shown on the left, there is an outermost border. This outermost border represents the piece of paper. There is also an area of white inside that outermost border, on which the image being printed is shown. This area of white is the printable area, and you’ll notice on the HP printers (and other ink jet printers using their default settings) that it is not centered within the outermost border.

The easiest way to center an image on the HP printers that I can think of is to make sure that the "Show Bounding Box" checkbox is checked, that the "Center" checkbox is NOT checked, and then grab the image and center it between the edges of the *outermost border* (NOT the white area). You’ll of course have to make sure that the image is printing small enough to still remain entirely within the white area when it has been centered between the edges of the outermost border, otherwise it will get cropped by the edge of the printable area. But this is easy to see in the Preview dialog.

If you’re printing with an Epson, rather than go through all that above, just go into the Advanced printer settings and make sure that the printable area is set to "Centered" rather than "Maximum". Then you can tell Elements to center the printout and all will be just fine.

If someone is actually having a problem with a Canon printer, post here with the model number. I would be pleased to download the driver for that printer as well, and see if there are any settings in the printer driver that would help (as there is in the Epson drivers).

Pete

Peter,

You put in a lot of time and effort on this. Those with HP printers who wish to center will find this helpful I’m sure.

"Nancy S" wrote in message

[…] Those with HP printers who wish to center will find this helpful I’m

sure.

….and with similar issues on other brands. One can only hope. 🙂

Pete,

I agree with Nancy, very helpful, thanks.

Larry

Peter, thanks for the work you did on this. This laptop doesn’t have the 1215 loaded, so I can’t experiment until later, but I will. Of course, by now I have all those numbers memorized! 🙂