Why your PDF prints with the edges cut off

Ordinary home and office printers can't lay ink on the outer 3–5mm of the sheet. If the PDF pushes content to the very edge of the page, that strip will be lost no matter what you configure.

That's why the “Actual size (100%)” print option is only safe for documents with generous margins. For posters and flyers designed to the edge, choosing “Fit to page” and letting the printer scale down is the standard answer.

A4 (210×297mm) and US Letter (216×279mm) differ in both width and height. PDFs from US software or overseas senders are often Letter-sized, and printing one on A4 paper at 100% clips the sides or produces odd vertical margins.

You can check a document's page size with the PDF Info tool. When the sizes don't match your paper, “Fit to page” in the print dialog resolves most cases.

A file merged from several sources can have different page sizes page by page. Print scaling is then applied differently per page, giving you the maddening symptom of some pages fine and others clipped.

Unify the page sizes before printing — trim oversized pages with the crop tool, or better, check each source document's size before merging in the first place.

When single-sided prints are fine but double-sided ones lose content near the spine, the binding margin (gutter) setting is the likely cause. The printer driver shifts content to leave room for binding.

For documents you won't bind, set the gutter to zero in the driver settings. For documents you will bind, the real fix is building the PDF with a generous inner margin from the start.

When you hit a clipped print, work through these. Most cases end at step two.