Margins and Centering

As I've described here before, thanks to a long-standing bug in Epson's Mac OS driver, centering images on cut sheets is a hassle, although it's relatively straight forward when printing on roll paper. Somewhat associated with the centering issue is the 7900's inability to print with very narrow margins (again, on cut sheets), especially the trailing edge of the sheet as it exits the printer. That margin's minimum is slightly more than half an inch (1.3 cm) because the printer needs something to hold on to at the end of the page.

So, just print with half-inch or greater margins, right? Right—that'll work fine, and if you want your image centered (using a Mac), do a little math and enter the appropriate values in the printer driver dialog box.

I'm coming from several years of using a Canon iPF 5000, which could print with 3mm margins (less than 1/8 inch) on all four sides of cut sheets. I regularly made prints with narrow end margins on letter-size sheets.  My inventory includes a number of small frames and mats, roughly 17 inches x 13 inches (43 x 33 cm); the mat opening for these is 10.25 x 6.7 inches (26 x 17 cm). I'd make the print about 10.5 inches wide x 7 inches high, and then over mat so there's no white border of paper. In landscape orientation, this left plenty of margin to hinge-mount the print, especially if I printed off center a little to make the top (longest) margin a bit wider than the bottom. This was easily set up and controlled with the Canon driver or print plug-in, so there were no surprises when the print was made. I got exactly what I expected.

Epson's documentation makes it clear that cut sheets should be inserted into the printer in portrait orientation, that is, with a narrow edge first. From the User's Guide: "Make sure you load paper in the portrait orientation (short edge first)." Following those instructions, I'd insert my sheet into the printer, and in the printer driver uncheck the Center Image checkbox. I'd leave the top margin as it was (centered), and set the left margin to something very narrow. I experimented with this, wasting lots of paper, only to learn the printer will not print wider than about 10.2 inches on letter size sheets. I created a custom paper size of 8.5 x 11 inches with zero margins, but even with that, the image would be clipped at 10.2 inches. It appeared I'd not be able to make any new prints for my inventory of these frames.

But there IS a way to make these prints: create a custom paper size of 11 x 8.5 inches, with a .25 inch top margin, zero margins on the remaining sides. Insert the sheet into the printer with the long edge first. This is a challenge for these small sheets, as this orientation leaves no paper edge above the top of the printer. It's necessary to drop the sheet into place. With some practice I was able to drop it straight, and square with the alignment mark on the printer.

The result is shown here. The image size is 6.93 x 10.4 inches (17,2 x 26.4 cm). I measured the actual margins at slightly under .25 inches left, .375 inches right, slightly under .875 inches top, and a little over .625 inches bottom. The print area measured exactly what I expected.

This requires more effort than the old Canon did, but it means I can use my remaining inventory of these frames and mats. Once these frames are gone I won't order more. I'm not keen on making prints this size anyway. I didn't buy the 7900 to make letter-size prints!

  --Jay