When a business document prints cut off or on the wrong paper size

A document that looks right on screen can still print with the right column cut off, the totals missing or everything shrunk into a corner. Nearly always the cause is one of three things: the wrong paper size, a scaling setting, or the browser’s own margins, headers and footers. Work through the steps below in order.

1. Match the paper size

The two common office paper sizes are close, but not the same:

Letter is about 6 mm wider; A4 is about 18 mm taller. So a Letter layout printed on A4 at 100% tends to lose its right edge, and an A4 layout printed on Letter tends to lose its bottom, which is where the totals and signature lines are.

Check two places:

1. The document. Choose the paper you print on under Paper above the preview in the editor, so the preview, the print and the PDF are all laid out for it.
2. The print dialog. Set Paper size to the same size. If the printer’s own settings or tray are set to the other size, the printer may crop or rescale the page anyway.

If you send PDFs to customers in another country, use their size or accept that their printer will scale the page slightly. If you print a document made for the other paper size, use “Fit to page” as a fallback; it shrinks the page a little (see the next step).

2. Keep the scale at 100% (Actual size)

In the print dialog, look for Scale (Chrome and Edge show it under More settings; Firefox and Safari show it in the main dialog).

• 100% (Actual size) is right in almost every case: choose the same Paper in the editor as in the printer, and the page fits exactly.
• Use Fit to printable area (called Fit to page or Scale to fit in some dialogs) only as a fallback when you cannot change the paper size, for example when printing a Letter PDF from a customer on A4; the page then shrinks slightly and nothing is cut.
• A Custom value left over from another job (60%, 140%) causes tiny or cut-off prints. Reset it.

3. Margins, headers and footers

Most printers cannot print to the very edge of the sheet. The documents already leave a margin of about 14 mm (a little over half an inch) on every side, so set the browser’s Margins to Default or None, not to a large custom value.

Turn off Headers and footers in the print dialog. Otherwise the browser adds the date, the page title and the web address at the top and bottom of the sheet, and can push content onto an extra page. The document prints its own page numbers.

4. Print the PDF instead

If the browser print still looks wrong, use Download PDF in the editor rather than Print. The download is a real PDF file with a fixed page size, made from the same layout as the preview. Open it in a PDF viewer, choose Actual size (or 100%), and print. Because the page size is fixed inside the file, it prints the same from any computer, and you can email the same file to your customer.

On an iPhone or iPad, the PDF may open in a viewer instead of being saved. Use the Share button there to save it to Files or to print it.

5. Long documents and multi-page tables

When there are more lines than fit on one page, the document continues on the next page:

• the column headings repeat at the top of each new page, and the title is marked “(continued)”;
• a row is never split across two pages, so a long description moves to the next page as a whole;
• the totals block stays together and comes after the last row;
• every page is numbered, for example “Page 2 of 3”.

If a document runs to an extra page with only a few lines on it, shorten long descriptions, put details under Notes, or use a smaller logo. Large logos and long free text push content down, which is a common cause of a second page.

6. Still cut off?

• Compare the print dialog’s preview with the screen before you print.
• Try another browser, or print the downloaded PDF from a different PDF viewer.
• Check the printer’s own settings (paper type and tray size) in your computer’s printer settings, not only in the browser dialog.

These steps apply to every document.