Centered, Finally!!!

I've had my 7900 since October, 2011. Several times in the early days I wrote about the difficulty centering a print on sheet paper when printing from the Mac. I had a number of email discussions with Friend Dean, who's been mentioned several times in this blog. He prints to his 7900 from Windows 7; the printing architecture is quite different, of course, and the dialog boxes he sees in Photoshop for setting up a print job appear to be somewhat different from those seen when printing from the Mac. With Windows there are 'center' checkboxes in two different dialogs, those being the large dialog (with image preview) one initially sees when invoking printing from Photoshop, and a second that's raised by clicking the Print Settings... button in that dialog.

However, on the Mac, with OS X going back  at least to 10.8 and Photoshop CS5, there is no centering control, checkbox or otherwise, on that second dialog. Still, if the 'center' box is checked on the initial dialog, one would expect the print to be centered. But when printing on cut sheets, it never is. This has been endlessly frustrating. After all, most of the prints I make are for paying clients. Within my small collection of clients I have a reputation for making high-quality prints, on the best choice of paper for a given image. I handle these prints with utmost care, and go to extremes when packaging prints for shipping to insure they arrive undamaged. My clients expect perfection, and are willing to pay for it.

Imagine, then, their perception of my work for them if they unpacked a print and found uneven borders around the image. To me this appears unprofessional and sloppy. To avoid that I've made a number of trail prints and determined reasonable offsets that insure very-nearly-centered prints. When printing, I check the 'centered' box to get the printer's default margins (which it apparently, and erroneously, thinks make a centered print), and then I uncheck the box and enter the appropriate offsets in the fields for top and left margins. A PITA, to be sure, but worth the effort, and occasional wasted print, to get it right. I really hate it, but that's just part of life with a 7900.

Earlier this month I made a few small prints of my work, on letter-size sheets. When, while setting up to print I selected the sheet size I noticed an option I didn't recall seeing before, 'US Letter (Sheet - Centering)'. Huh? Where'd that come from? What does it do? I never imaged it meant the image would be centered on the sheet, since the 'centered' checkbox is just kidding, not really meaning the image would be centered. As I'm afflicted by extreme curiosity I could only select that option and make the prints. Imagine my surprise when I measured the margins around the image and found it perfectly centered!

Note the top and bottom border shading: they are now equal, providing a visual indicator of the centered image. Click or tap for a larger image.

Note the new option, '(Sheet - Centering)' for paper size in the Print Settings... dialog. Click or tap for a larger image.

1. Where did this come from: The Epson driver? Photoshop? The Mac OS?
2. When did it appear?
3. If the image is large, approaching the margins of the sheet, is the new option still available?

I have more questions, but they become increasingly academic and irrelevant if the new option works consistently (or, even if it doesn't). As usual I did some testing to answer those top three.

For #1 there is some confusion, as both Photoshop and the Mac OS have been updated here since I last printed on sheet paper. But we can rule out Epson's driver; the most recent version for Mac OS X is 9.33, released 29 October, 2014, according to Epson's US Drivers and Downloads page. It's what I have.

For #2: I updated the Mac to OS X 10.11, "El Capitan" last fall, after waiting for the 10.11.1 version release. I finished building a clean system, with Photoshop CC 2015, in late November and have used that exclusively since. I updated Photoshop CC on 18 December to 2015.1.1. Best guess: it was that Ps update that brought the new centering feature. As I recall, I printed only on roll paper through the rest of December, so I'd not have noticed if the new sheet feature became available immediately after that Ps update. For the record, OS X is now at 10.11.3, and there's been another Ps CC update which I've not yet installed.

For #3: Yes. The new centering option appears in the paper size selection list regardless of sheet size selected and regardless of the image size. I've only tested with US sizes, and only up to 17 x 22 inches.

The centering has worked perfectly on images I've printed on several sheet sizes, and seems to behave consistently. After dealing with the original problem for several years, I'm delighted it's gone away.

  --Jay