Printing Tips

Here are a few tips to help you get the most out of your prints here at Mint Printables. Most of these tips will work well for printing difficulties you may encounter at other sites as well.

Best Prints at Mint Printables

Use the download version for best results

The best way to get crisper prints really is to download the zip file and print offline. The online versions often results in fuzzy printouts because of the way browsers handle printable content. (They ignore DPI settings, will often print at a different size than expected and it changes based on the browser, printer, paper and even user settings... so results vary greatly.)

Want the fast print online?

If you do go for the quick online print, please be sure to print with the print button on the page, not File -> Print. Using the browsers print button will leave you with a mostly blank page. ;-)

Remove Headers & Footers

Some of the printables here work far better with no header or footer printed on the page, this gives extra space for the larger printables. If you're not sure how to do that, here are the instructions for removing the header and footer from your final prints in Windows and Mac OSX.

Minimize Margins

Same reason as above, it gives more space to the final printout and in some cases with the larger ones it makes a huge difference. Here's how do do that for Windows and Mac OSX.

Pages Printing Empty?

First thing, make sure you have ink... I've done this myself, printed, got a blank sheet and spent hours trying to find where I made a mistake in the web pages code... I had ran out of ink. :-/

This will also happen here on Mint Printables (and a few other sites) if File -> Print is used instead of the print link on the page, so please be sure to use that one.

Prints getting cut off or shrunk?

Adjust Your Printers Settings: For many of the printables here at Mint Printables (and other sites), you may need to adjust your printer margins as well as remove the header and footer. The reason is that most browsers have different default settings, and even printer type etc. can all effect it. There's no easy way I've found yet to be able to make the images print perfectly without someone having to change settings. Sorry, I wish I could, luckily it's easy for you to adjust the settings for yourself. Visit the links above if you're unsure how / what to adjust.

Try Enabling "Shrink to Fit": If you've adjusted your margins and it's still getting cropped during print, it's possible that it's because some printers insist on a larger margin than others, so you may have to enable 'shrink to fit'. (That may not be the exact wording depending on your operating system, browser or brand of printer, but there is usually something similar. Take a look around your settings and I'm sure you'll find it.)

Download The Image Instead: Another option is to download the images (either right click and choose 'save image' or by clicking the download link provided and print it from another program on your computer. The Windows Picture and Fax View offers many options using the Photo Printing Wizard and may be able to give you a better final printout than your browser. For Apple users, I've printed quite a few from Mac's default Preview application and they turned out beautifully.

Other Common Causes:

  1. Check that you are using the right size of paper, I've tested mine on standard 8.5 by 11 inch paper, smaller paper may result in prints getting cropped or cut off.
  2. Check that your printer and / or browser preferences are set to the right size of paper. Sometimes printers default to using the last used setting and (depending what you printed last) that may not be the behavior you want.
  3. Automatic Image Resizing: Some browsers will in some situations scale the image to fit within the browsers viewing area and if you print the image before you resize it back to the actual size it may print much smaller than is intended. While this shouldn't happen if the printables are viewed from within a page on Mint Printables website, it will happen if the image is viewed alone. Many browsers will resize to actual size by simply clicking the image and / or allow you to disable this feature in the preferences.

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