GreatManuals.com
Huge Collections of Software Manuals and Knowledgebase

Printer Alignment

Printers are imprecise beasts. You can tell them to print something exactly 1.2 inches from the top of the paper, but chances are, it'll end up being more like 1.1 or 1.28 inches from the top. The older your printer gets, the more likely this is to occur, as all the little mechanical bits that escort paper into and out of the printer get worn out. You're not likely to notice this flaw when you're printing, say, a resumé. And if your interviewer is measuring the margins on your resumé, you may be happier elsewhere anyway. But when you're printing CD labels on a pre-cut form, every millimeter matters. (That's why millimeters would rather be on a CD label than a plain sheet of paper - they like to feel important.) If your printer is a millimeter awry on a CD label, you'll get a millimeter of white, unprinted space on your label. It won't look good.

However, if your printer is consistently wrong, which is often the case, you can use this dialog to correct it. If the printer always prints a millimeter to the right of where it's supposed to, you can use this dialog to tell the program to always print labels one millimeter to the left of where they'd normally go, which will cancel out the printer's imprecision and make things print just where they ought to be.

Here's a summary of the controls on this page:

When printing on: Lets you select the printer for which you want to set offsets.

Move labels by: There's one of these sections each for horizontal and vertical paper alignment. Enter the amount of space, in millimeters, by which you need to move labels horizontally and vertically, respectively, for the printer you've chosen.

To the left/To the right: Lets you select the direction in which to correct your printer's horizontal printing errors. If your printer always prints stuff too far to the right, check the "To the left" box. If it always prints too far to the left, check the "To the right" box.

Up/Down: Lets you select the direction in which to correct your printer's vertical printing errors. If your printer always prints stuff too far down the page, check the "Up" box. If if prints too high, check the "Down" box.

Don't apply to printable discs: If this box is checked, the printer-alignment settings you make here will be ignored when you're printing on printable discs. We recommend checking this option. The printer alignment error that occurs when printing on paper from a paper tray is highly unlikely to be identical to any printer alignment error that occurs when you're printing on a CD tray inserted into the printer, so using the same settings for both is likely to create as many problems as it solves. We recommend using the alignment settings on this dialog to account for paper-related alignment errors, and using the Edit Paper/Printer Templates dialog (which you can launch from the File menu) to account for any printable-disc alignment error.

If your printer doesn't align correctly, but isn't consistent about it, you can correct it by telling Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker to stretch labels when it prints them. You can set the stretch amount on the Stretch Labels page.