Ubuntu Tales - Custom Printing

When my fiancée asked what to do about wedding invitations, I told her (foolishly, perhaps) that I'd take care of them, instead of having them custom-printed. Fast forward a few months, and I'm deep into getting all the items printed. The problem I've been battling is custom page sizes in Ubuntu.

The documents I'm printing are PDFs sized specifically to the different paper sizes of the invites (5x7inch, 5x3.5inch,etc). I was able to print the actual invite cards without much hassle. The thing that made this so painless is Adobe Reader (and evince) have access to a custom print size called “5x7 photo borderless.” This allowed the document to print with images right up to the edge of the pages (if the printer loaded the paper properly).

The headaches came when I had to print inserts and RSVP cards that were 5x3.5. There's no option for borderless printing at this size. I was able to make a custom size manually and was able to print the pages pretty easily, but there's a few millimeters of border around the images. It's not a deal breaker, but I thought I could do better. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, I could not get my HP 2512 inkjet to print without any kind of margin. I messed with custom page options, and I also messed with the HP device manager, to little avail. If the page size doesn't already exist and have a borderless option, I can't do it.

So I gave up and booted into Windows 7.

Interestingly, I had even less luck in Windows with this printer. I had to go through a big rigmarole to make a custom page size (I had to configure the “print server” with a new “form type”, none of which is intuitive). But even when I did that successfully, Adobe Reader would completely ignore the new page size I created. It would try to print to a 3.5x5, but because of the way the paper loads, I needed it to be a 5x3.5, and it would absolutely refuse my new custom page.

My fiancee's computer (running Windows XP) has a Dell inkjet that I tried out. This printer not only let me print to a 5x3.5, but I was able to do so without any border at all, just by selecting one checkbox, and it did a better job of feeding the cards in, so I didn't have to rotate it. Alas, even when selecting the highest print quality available, the image was not as dark as the invitations I had previously printed.

So the good news is that my headaches printing the custom page sizes weren't necessarily caused by Ubuntu but had more to do with the software and hardware of the printer itself. The bad news is I'm still going to be wrestling with printing the invitations a while longer.