I am trying to print cards as a service on my website (www.ultimate-top-trumps.co.uk) and have created a few templates. I have measured a border around which I have 9 cards with no borders. For example I have a 1cm border (far left of A4 sheet), 6cm (card 1), 6cm (card 2), 6cm (card 3) and 2cm border far right. Therefore the measurements are the width of an A4 sheet. When I print this the 1cm and 2cm borders come out as 7.5mm and 18mm respectively. I then tried to print the page and printed it to use the whole sheet, borderless printing. When I measured this, the borders I had allowed were the correct size but the cards had increased in size by 2mm both in hieght and width.
So, my question is, how can I print the cards so that the printed sheet has the exact same measurements as those on the screen?
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I have an HP 5150 and tried all the various settings and none make any change. Do you have any idea how I might overcome this? I do appreciate that any specifics are not possible but any advice would be greatly appreciated.
Also note that screen measurements are notoriously unreliable. For instance, changing a monitor resolution will generally mess up screen dimensions. The only accurate screen dimension is pixel, and pixel (alone, not ppi) does not relate to paper measurements.
Thats interesting! What would the safest dpi to work with be? My screen res is 1280 x 1024 and I am working with 300 dpi images. Sorry if it sounds so basic and simple but any advice is greatly appreciated.
You can’t really get there from here. For instance, I have a 15 inch monitor. If you have a 19 inch monitor, then the 1280×1024 on the two will be totally different sizes.
Best suggestion I can make is to print something out and then play with the ppi to make the image at 100% look the same.
If you could bring the Photoshop images into Illustrator or InDesign, you could likely control the size and position much more easily.
Or you could try making up a page with the rulers (measurements set on cm)and guidelines with temporary fine lines on the guidelines to print; measure the printout and play with the Photoshop document until it’s right for you. From then on, place your images in that document on a second layer and save by name to avoid overwriting the original blank document.
While I have the ear of some really helpful chaps does anyone know how to use a Guillotine? I know I know, dead easy! Going back to the cards I am trying to print I am also having issues with cutting them out with a guillotine. It should be easy peasy but….
I know the width of each card, 6cm and yet when I put the uncut cards on the guillotine, line it up, measured from the guillotine base and cut it either cuts too much or too little by around 8mm either way. I remeasure and cut again and the same happens.
I know it is not rocket science but 2 other people have also tried cutting out the cards and had the exact same problem or it cut not straight. I really do not understand it becasue it is an Avery Precision Guillotine an the measurements on the base match a steel rule and is square.
It’s very hard to cut something square on a guillotine cutter. The problem is as the blade moves down the length of the paper, it pull the paper in to the blade making it twist away from the stop at the top of the cutter. Roller blade cutters do it too but much less and are the preferred tool for cutting photographs after a good heavy steel straight edge and a razor blade.
To me a guillotine is a print shop cutting machine, and they can do a wonderful job in cutting squarely and accurately. They apply several hundred pounds of pressure to the paper, to ensure it does not slide like in the old high school cutters.
You might want to find a local small print shop that will cut jobs for you. These machines can cut several hundred cards at a time, saving a lot of time, and probably will only charge a few dollars.
And, if you get to be friends with them, they might occasionally feed you additional DTP work.
There is a function in Photoshop called View > Print Size It sets zoom to mimic physical print dimensions.
It’s not accurate at first because it’s set for a 72 ppi screen (supposedly the original 1984 MacIntosh).
You can change that to reflect your own screen resolution.
Edit > Preferences > Units & Rulers
Go to the New Document Preset Resolutions section,and enter "Screen Resolution" in pixels/in or pixels/cm (horizontal resolution (i.e. 1280 px) divided by the screen’s physical size)
Open a blank document, open the rulers (ctrl-r),select the Hand Tool and Print Size on the toolbar. The onscreen rulers should closely match an actual ruler held to the screen. tweak that setting as needed.
Once you have set your image dimensions, are you printing at 100%, with "borderless printing" turned OFF? That’s what you need to do. 100% should give you a print with the same dimensions as your image, as long as borderless printing is turned off. If it’s turned on, your image will be expanded slightly, ruining the 100% image to print ratio. On the other hand, if you have your printer and/or photoshop to shrink the image to the printable area, your image will be reduced slightly to allow for necessary margins — it sounds like this is what’s happening to you. When you print an image at 100% with borderless off, you will often get a dialog about how the image exceeds the printable area and clipping will occur. This means that your white borders will overlap the unprintable areas, and is what you want.
Ben Willmore addressed the "Print Size = Screen ISze question in a very helpful free PDF on his site a few years ago.
The concepts have already been touched upon in this thread, but I’m lazy and offer an article that’s been around for awhile, and which explains it ell. I’ve recommended it to anyone who has this same question, probably a half-dozen times in the past several years.
While you’re at it, visit the following link and bookmark it immediately. It’s foundationally important information that you’ll find important throughout your career. You may not have the time to read it all right now, but it’s the best online explanation about how to get a real understanding of the concepts of resolution. Many here will agree. I’ve recommended this site at least 500 times to people struggling with the understanding resolution.
Read it slowly and absorb it as you have time. It’s truly of life-long importance:
It pisses me off to no end, sometimes, when I’m composing, then clarifying, and editing, and adding stuff to a reply, then I run out of the 30-minute editing access time.
I don’t mean to sound like I’m putting myself in an echelon above every other user who visits here, but SOME of uspeople who have been around for a long time, and who are sincere about providing answers really ought to be rewarded with access to more editing time.
I hear you, J.J., loud and clear. That’s a beautiful, fundamental concept that I learned at my carpenter-Grandfather’s knee from a very young age.
But it’s also not so egotistic to be proud of making relevant replies quickly. Those folks asking the questions really appreciate the responsiveness here.
But sometimes, the afterthoughts are just as important, just like IRL. And they fit better sometimes, not as afterthoughts, but as a part of the original reply.
These aren’t boards we cut here, but concepts. Your analogy is close, J.J., but just shy of "just right."
There are just some pages, and sites, that offer such good info, that it’d be ridiculously stupid not to bookmark them and pass them along to our fellow infonauts.
You probably have a great pile of them that I don’t have and vice-versa. We may not both be completely dialed in to the other’s list, but we both *get* the need to gather the lists.
And yeah…reinventing wheels wastes a lot of effort.
I’d rather be the first guy to invent free energy, or dead-perfect automatic vectorizing, or an actual home-oven pizza as good as a neighrbood eaterie’s, or something. There’s more reward, usually, in being the first.
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