PDF prints with the edges cut off — why, and how to fix it
2026-10-05
The document looks fine on screen, then prints with the footer sliced off. Almost always this is the printer's unprintable edge overlapping content that sits too close to the paper's border.
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What causes it
- Home and office printers cannot print the outer 3–5 mm of the sheet
- Content placed in that band simply disappears
- Printing an A4 document on Letter paper (or the reverse) crops it, since the sizes differ
Try the print dialog first
Set Page Scaling to Fit or Shrink oversized pages. Everything fits, though the content ends up slightly smaller.
Check that the paper size matches the document. An A4 file needs A4 paper to print at its intended size.
Fixing it in the PDF
Scans often carry a black border or wide empty margins. Cropping those away makes the content area proportionally larger, and it frequently fits without any scaling.
If a wide table runs off a portrait page, rotating those pages to landscape solves it outright.