My wife tries printing PDF files using Document Viewer and no matter how many settings we try in the page setup dialog box, we cannot seem to get “actual size” on a printout. The nearest we can get is “none” on the scaling but that still prints margins that are larger than actual sizes set on the PDF so that a half inch margin is more like 5/8" to 3/4". I’m on a Mac and using Adobe InDesign I have no problem printing to our shared Canon Pixma 8520 and having true output with 1/2" margins. She has Canon Pixma 8520 drivers on her Linux so that’s the choice we’re making, but still it’s not true 100% printing. Are there any suggestions someone would have? It looks like it’s a Linux issue, and not the drivers from what we see.
Hi David. Not sure I have enough info to be sure about a solution.
The first thing I would try is setting the desired page settings directly in the printer, rather than doing it from the PDF viewing application.
so, find your printer in settings. Configure for the job. You can save the settings for later.
Hope that’s enough to get you going.
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@DavidBorrink Are you still having this issue? If so, @vasileios is a wizard at figuring these things out. Best place to start is which distro are you using?
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We’ve got the latest Mint on her laptop. I haven’t tried benhamin’s idea yet. So we’re technically still the same.
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@DavidBorrink definitely let us know when you have tried it. Tag @vasileios if there are still problems. Congrats on taking the steps to your Digital Freedom. Cheers!!
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@DavidBorrink, I had the same problem with Document Viewer messing with my printer settings.
Further, once DV had hosed the printer’s settings, all subsequently-printed documents were equally mis-sized and not controllable thru any software.
The workarounds for me:
- perform a physical reset on the printer, not thru the software, but via buttons on the printer itself,
- attempt to reset DV’s preferences (see screenshots below), or
- never print from DV.
The “never from DV” option is the least annoying. 
.
.
(reset screenshots):
Here are the settings I changed to try and reign in DV. 'Though I confess I haven’t had the courage to try printing from the program again to confirm whether or not this actually works.
First, deselect “Best Fit” and “Fit Page Width”:
Then, save those parameters:
(end of screenshots)
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Overdue follow-up here. I finally got around to digging deeper. It turned out that there are two tabs in the print setup dialog box that affected this. There’s a page scaling setting under Paper handling, and there’s a print scaling choice under “Advanced”. I would never have thought to look for a second one if there’s a setting under the first. But we got it to work finally by making sure BOTH had a “none” setting.
Not sure why one needs two scaling dialogs. But apparently the second one was overriding the first.
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