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Is it possible to force print a PDF file borderless?

Super User Asked by SjonTeflon on November 29, 2021

I have a poster in PDF format which I would like to share with a group of people. They will (most likely) print the document, but it is designed to be printed without the standard margin/border the printer usually applies. Is it possbile to “force” the end-user to print it borderless?

2 Answers

I am using Adobe Acrobat X, available in 2016, maybe, though old even then. In it I can use the cropping function to crop as I desire.

Doing so about a PDF framed with a box border (part drawing), and printing the result shows I can achieve almost borderless printing with no effort.

"Almost"... what borders I do get are ¼" top and bottom, and 0.17" left and right. Those are the borders beyond which a Word document print job will tell me my borders are sketchy, and ask if it should still try.

My printer has those borders as its limits, so surprise, surprise that these should be what Acrobat uses as its absolute edges. This would be built into the printer driver, surely, and reported out to Acrobat.

My driver will not let me expand those edges to or past the actual border. So I am at the end vis-a-vis that printer. Our conference room though, has an inkjet printer that allows for borderless printing as an option.

When printed on that, I see the print job essentially do that: borderless printing. A real-life exception here is that I cut more off the left/right dimension than off the up/down dimension, so I only get it the one borderless way.

So yes, you ought to be able to achieve borderless printing, though you might have to be very careful about where, exactly, your cropping happens. Maintain your exact aspect ratio (11/8.5 = 22/17 = 1.2941176471). Or cut a wee bit off, left/right or top/bottom depending upon which works best for your precise page.

Now that's Acrobat. Not sure if Adobe Reader (the free program) allows cropping at all.

Nor might it allow exporting the page as an image. Or it may. If so, as Acrobat does, you can use an actual graphics program (GIMP, perhaps) to process things and even expand differentially left/right and up/down (which Acrobat won't do!) and more expertly handle making it being morphed a tad work well. Then printing to a printer that accepts borderless input might fill the page perfectly.

Answered by Jeorje on November 29, 2021

Adobe PDF is a document display format, not a document layout wordprocessing format, more or less.

If you have access to the original document and can modify it, then you can change the margins to suit your needs, but the ability to change the margins is very limited or not available at all in the Reader application.

Answered by music2myear on November 29, 2021

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