Prints wrong page size

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philwynk
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Nov 26, 2013 1:44 pm

Prints wrong page size

Post by philwynk »

Hi, all.

I'm creating a book cover in gimp 2.8.6. Gimp does have its own .pdf generating facility, but it does not permit embedding Truetype fonts in any way that I've discovered, so I have to use a print facility like doPDF.

So, I installed doPDF and here's what happens:

My book has 7 X 10 pages, and the cover naturally has to account for front and back, plus a spine of about .91 inches. That yields an image width of 15.158" when I add bleed space. The height is 10.25, again allowing for bleed height. So the image is 15.158" X 10.25" -- in pixels, at 300 dpi, it's 4,547 X 3,075.

So I specify page size in gimp as Ledger, portrait (yeah, it looks landscape with the 11" side vertical, but that's how it works.) And I specify doPDF Print Preferences to use a custom page size of 11" x 17", 300 dpi, 100% scale, and apply that. So far, so good.

Then I print, specifying large file size and embedded fonts. It prints beautifully onto an 11 x 17 sheet. But the image on the sheet is only about 7" by 10". It's oriented correctly, and appears justified to the left of the sheet with about a 2 1/2" top margin. The image appears to be almost exactly 1/2 the size I specified in gimp in both dimensions.

That's wrong. But I can't see anything to change to make it print the correct image size.

Any thoughts?

philwynk
Posts: 2
Joined: Tue Nov 26, 2013 1:44 pm

Re: Prints wrong page size

Post by philwynk »

Alright, I did my own research, and here's what I found:

There appears to be a serious bug in the Windows print kit that Gimp uses. It's been known for quite a long time, and has not been resolved. It apparently manifests when one attempts to specify a page size other than letter or A4; the selection does not stick, and the image gets scaled to the wrong page size.

There's a lengthy discussion of the problem here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=505123.

The workaround appears to be "Don't print from gimp." Seriously. I exported my image from gimp to a .bmp file, opened it with Windows Photo Viewer, printed from doPDF, and voila! Properly-sized image on a tabloid sheet.

Claudiu (Softland)
Posts: 1560
Joined: Thu May 23, 2013 7:19 am

Re: Prints wrong page size

Post by Claudiu (Softland) »

Thank you for sharing this problem and solution with the rest of the community.

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