Preview - PDFs printing with wrong page margins?

[didoman]

I'm having an odd problem with the way Preview is printing page margins of PDFs. The issue first came up last week when I was printing a PDF (typeset in LaTeX) report from Preview. In LaTeX I had defined 1 inch page margins on letter paper (university requirements), and the PDF looks perfect on screen. But when I print it, it comes out with 1 inch margins on the bottom and left, and ~1.6 inch margins on the top and right! Also, it seems that the document has been scaled down (same aspect ratio, smaller size) in order to fit in the smaller space.

Get Info reports the page size to be 21.59 x 27.94 cm (correct letter size). When I try to print again, I notice that the Print Preview (the small preview contained in the print dialog) actually shows that the document will be printing with wrong borders! Why is this?? I mucked around with the printer settings a bit, to no avail. I obviously couldn't submit it like that - the work-around was to fire up my XP VM (Fusion) and print it from acrobat reader 9 on the windows side. But there's gotta be a solution on the mac side!

Also, I'm thinking that it's not LaTeX - the same issue came up when I tried to print my exam timetable (a PDF that my school probably made with Acrobat and Word). One thing that comes to mind is that Apple released a brother printer driver update a month or so ago, could this be causing the problem (printer is a Brother laser, HL2070N)? It's possible that it's been doing it to everything I print, and I just haven't noticed it until now...

System is a macbook C2D 2GHz (last rev). Any help or insight is appreciated!!

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Do you have any "scale" or "page scaling" settings set in either the "Print" or "Page Setup" dialog? Anything on scaling set to something other than 100%? Anything about "scale page to fit printer margins" or anything?

[didoman]

Aha, I had been cycling through the different options in the print dialog (such as Layout, Print Settings, etc.), but completely missed the "automatic page scaling" option... There's a text box that lets you enter a % scale (was 100, changing it did nothing), but below that there are 3 radio buttons for automatic scaling. I don't know how I missed them! Somehow "Scale each page to fit paper" is the default, and it should be "No automatic page scaling". why would this be the default? it makes more sense to me to print things to scale by default... anyway, thanks ElDiablo, issue resolved.

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Glad to hear it's sorted...

...as for the default setting, though, I think it's meant so that the vast majority of computer users (non-technical types sitting at home) can just press the "Print" button and get something on their printer that fits the printer's paper margins, without having to worry about things like, "This document is 8.5x14, and I only have 8.5x11 paper, so I need to scale it down to fit rather than printing sections on two different pieces of paper."