Home Forums Peripherals & Multimedia Peripherals "Save as PDF" vs. Straight printing problem

When I print Quickbooks invoices, sometimes I want to print a bunch of them to PDF for batch printing later. I've got my layouts very specifically set in QB so that invoices, when folded properly, slot neatly into a windowed envelope with both ours and customers addresses showing clearly whenever they're sent straight to the printer.

However, doing Save as PDF seems to shift the whole page up by about an inch, cutting off the top (and ruining the layout, of course.) The PDF itself looks great, and is plenty suitable for emailing, but rendered onto paper is a disaster.

An extensive Googling and messing around with settings has yielded nothing, so I'm hoping someone here might be able to help.

I hope someone else has a better idea, but the first thing that comes to mind is adjusting the top and bottom margins of the document. That probably requires other adjustments that you don't want to make. ...unless that's all part of your "messing around" already!

instead of printing, select open in preview from the print dialog. then from preview, attempt a print to save as pdf

I see examples all the time where a directly saved PDF has major differences (usually missing elements) from the document. Sometimes this trick gets around the problem.

Other than that your options are limited. Acrobat pro adds a printer to the print dialog which may help you. There are a few 3rd party free apps that do the same thing. (they were made for the mac os before it had the "save as pdf" option I think)

Thanks for the idea, but if anything, the document got moved even further up the page!

Ah well, it's not that big a deal.

Seeing how going through Preview didn't help, is adjusting the margins out of the running also?

Haven't tried adjusting the margins yet (looks like I"m going to have to for an engagement letter template I'm currently working on), but I have learned that the problem is not the way Preview creates PDFs, but the way it prints them.

Example 1: PDF created by Primo PDF on a windows XP box. Prints perfect both from windows and from Preview on OSX.

Example 2: PDF created by Preview on OSX. Exported to the windows XP machine, prints perfectly. Printed by Preview on OSX, horrible mutilation.

It's too late in the day for me to carry on troubleshooting this, so I'll hopefully have more info to contribute later.

Solved. Checking 'Scale each page to fit printer' does the trick. Don't know why it should have to be this way.

Cool! Thanks for letting us know. I suppose we can file this solution under the long list of idiosyncratic printer driver options...

Terrific! I don't see any identification of your printer above. What mfr. and model do you have?

An Hp Laserjet 1320. Not a bad little printer overall, considering it's an HP.

quite the workhorse. I've seen quite a lot of them around and they seem to be pretty "mac-like". (It Just Works)

Indeed, I have one and it works all right. But quite an air polluter too. Anybody recalls the smell when it prints? This IS particulate pollution, see http://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/es063049z