A PDF is supposed to be the format that prints exactly as designed. When it does not — text cropped at the edge, everything slightly too small, blank sheets between every page — the cause is nearly always a mismatch between the document's page size and the paper in the tray, and the printer driver quietly "helping" by rescaling.
The one setting that causes most problems
Print dialogues default to Fit to page or Shrink oversized pages. That default exists for a good reason: it prevents content being clipped when the document is larger than the paper. It also means almost nothing prints at the size it was designed.
The classic case is A4 versus US Letter. A4 is taller and narrower; Letter is shorter and wider. Neither fits inside the other. Print an A4 document on Letter with fitting enabled and everything shrinks by roughly 6% — invisible on a memo, and a genuine problem on anything where measurements matter: forms with signature boxes, architectural drawings, documents with a specified type size, anything a printer will trim.
For any document where dimensions matter, set scaling to Actual size or 100%. Then check the preview for clipping. If content is being cut, the fix is to change the paper or the document, not to let the driver shrink it.
The settings worth checking every time
- Paper size — match it to the document's page size, not to whatever the driver remembered from last time. Your reader's document properties panel tells you the page dimensions.
- Scaling — Actual size for anything precise; Fit to printable area only when you have decided a slight reduction is acceptable.
- Orientation — should follow the document automatically, but check when pages are mixed portrait and landscape.
- Page range — specify it, rather than discovering page 40 was a blank appendix.
- Duplex — and if your document has mixed orientations, check the binding edge, or alternate pages come out upside down.
- Print quality — draft mode is fine for reading copies and wastes far less ink.
Diagnosing the common failures
Content cropped at the edges. Almost no printer can print to the very edge of a sheet; there is an unprintable margin of a few millimetres. If the document has content in that zone, it will be clipped at Actual size. Either accept a small uniform reduction with "Fit to printable area", or fix the source document's margins. For anything genuinely edge-to-edge, you need a printer with borderless capability or a commercial press with bleed and trim.
Everything is slightly too small. Scaling is on. Set Actual size.
Blank pages appear between every page. Usually a duplex setting mismatch, or a document containing genuine blank pages inserted for double-sided layout. Check the preview to tell which.
A landscape page prints portrait. The page carries a rotation flag the driver is ignoring. Fix the rotation in the file itself and save — see how to rotate a PDF page. Note that a view rotation in your reader does not affect printing; the rotation has to be saved into the document.
Colours look wrong. Your screen is RGB and emits light; the printer is CMYK and reflects it. Some vivid on-screen colours have no CMYK equivalent and will print duller, particularly saturated blues and greens. For anything colour-critical, see CMYK vs RGB in PDF and colour management in PDF.
Text prints as boxes or the wrong typeface. Fonts were not embedded, and the printer substituted. See troubleshooting PDF fonts not displaying.
The printer stalls or crashes. Usually a very large or complex file — high-resolution scans and heavy vector graphics both do it. Compressing the file often resolves it, as does printing "as image" from the advanced settings, which rasterises pages before sending.
Annotations do not print. Comments and highlights sometimes need "Document and markups" selected under Comments & Forms. For anything you are sending onward, flattening removes the ambiguity entirely.
Printing a form you filled in
Filled form fields are the most common thing to vanish at the printer, because some drivers render the page and skip the interactive layer.
The reliable sequence: complete the form, export a flattened copy, then print that. Once your entries are part of the page content rather than annotations on top of it, no driver can decide to omit them. If you filled the form in Docento.app, the exported file is already flat — your text and signatures are drawn into the page. See how to fill out a PDF form.
To be accurate about our scope: we edit and sign pages rather than restructure documents, so rotation and page reordering need a different tool — Preview on a Mac, or one of the free options in how to rotate a PDF page.
Saving paper
Multiple pages per sheet. Under Layout or Multiple in most dialogues. Two-up on a landscape sheet is very readable for reference material; four-up works for slides.
Duplex. Halves the paper. Check the binding edge for mixed-orientation documents.
Print only what you need. Specify the range instead of printing a 60-page report for one appendix. See how to extract pages from a PDF if you want a permanent excerpt.
Preview first, always. Every reader shows exactly what will emerge. Ten seconds looking at it catches nearly every problem on this page before it costs you a ream.
