Setting up margins for home/office printers

[marlene]

I produced a series of brochures for a client who didn't tell me until the end of the project that they intend to provide PDFs to their members to print out on their office printers.

This is a problem, because the brochures all have full bleeds. :\

I need to rework the brochures to eliminate the bleeds. But the client wants a consistent white margin all around -- I can't let the end-user's printer determine the size of the margin.

Should I leave, say, a half-inch margin all around? Are there home/office printers that require a larger margin than that?

TIA,

mxh

[Steve Rindsberg]

Half an inch should be plenty but the result may depend on the user's individual settings in Reader/Acrobat/Whatever. They can opt to print the doc as is (giving you the margins you designed in) or shrink to fit, iwc the whole page you designed will be scaled down to fit the printers margins, giving you more margin than you expected. Nothing to slit wrists over, I guess. <g>

[marlene]

Oy, I forgot about how people mangle page image size in Reader (I doubt that many of the users will have full versions of Acrobat).

I often remind my clients NOT to select the shrink option, but they still do it (I'm sure they don't even glance at the options, just use whatever was set up last time) and then they complain about the HUGE margins and the TINY text.

Anyway, I consider the Reader Shrink Phenomenon to fall within the parameters of "not my problem" and will opt for the half inch margins. I don't think any of my own printers have ever required a larger margin.

FvH