PDF Files Printing Smaller Than The Original Size

Have you ever had PDF files printing smaller than normal? Well I did!

I desperately needed to print a few documents which were a PDF file type. This task is usually a matter of opening the file on my computer and then pressing the print icon, but of course a problem appeared just to hold up the process. The PDF file was printing smaller than the original size. Basically the PDF document was so small on the page, I could hardly read it.

I thought through what could have happened with my printer. I had just changed the ink in the printer, just added more paper, and just finished printing 100 word documents. But none of these seemed to be the problem.

I tried printing again, changing a few settings but nothing seemed to work. I even removed the option in the printer settings that says “shrink oversized pages” as I thought that the PDF file might be exceeding the margins to print.

As shown in the image below, my settings were on the “shrink oversized pages” so I changed this to “Fit” to see if it would solve my problem. It didn’t. (this method could be the answer for your problem though)

PDF Files Printing Smaller Than Original Size – How To Fix This Problem

1. Open your PDF document and press on the print icon. If your printer options do not appear, then look for a link saying “print using dialog”.  Another option is to save the PDF to your computer in order to print through regular settings. See the screenshot below.

2. When you’ve accessed the system printing dialog settings look for the page setup button or tab. See the screen shot below. The page setup button is at the bottom, however in some settings it is a tab at the top of the page.

3. Check the paper size in the page setup section. Here’s the culprit for my small sprinting. See the size of the paper is set to 4″ x 6″ which is very small. Even the preview shows the printing area is no where near the edges of the paper.

4. Simply change the paper size by clicking the drop down menu.

I changed my paper size settings to A4 as you can see above. After that, my printing PDF files smaller problem was fixed. Luckily I got my deadline printing done in time.