At home I have a Brother HL2040 Laser printer which I have been using
for a year now. It is hooked on a Windows machine and I print on it
from my Linux system. My distro is FC6.
A while back, I have noticed alignment problems but didn't pay too much
attention. I have reinstalled my distro from scratch recently and
decided to give this problem another look.
First I reinstalled the Brother drivers and printed a test page in
Cups. The result is perfect. Page border is misaligned by 1 millimeter
vertically and horizontally. The reason for this error could be mechanical.
Then I went in OpenOffice Writer (2.0.4). I created a simple test
document. Its page has a 2cm margin on every side and is surrounded by
a 1pt border. My expectation: the border should appear at exactly 2cm
of every edge on the printed page. The result? You can tell with your
eyes the page border isn't centered. I measured the distance from the
page edges to the printed border:
left: 2.1cm
right: 1.3cm
top: 1.6cm
bottom: 2.3cm
Next I exported the document as a PDF. I went in Adobe Reader
(7.0.9-1) and printed it. The result again has obvious errors. The
measurements:
left: 2.7cm
right: 1.3cm
top: 1.6cm
bottom: 2.3cm
I took the same PDF in kpdf (3.5.6-4.fc6) and printed it. The result is identical to acroread.
Finally, I took the PDF to the Windows machine and printed it. The result? Perfect. Off by 1mm horizontally.
I gave other Linux drivers a try. First the HL2060 driver:
- the test page has no printer margin
- identical problems in OO and acroread
I also tried a modified HL1250 driver (http://www.profv.de/brother/):
- the test page prints perfectly (the imageable area is larger than the one defined by Brother by a matter of mm).
- identical problems in OO and acroread
One last note about acroread. I was printing with the following options:
- Page scaling: none. Using fit/reduce to printer margin squeezes the page further, apparently by the value of printer margins.
- auto rotate & scale: yes
I'd like someone to tell me what the origin of this problem could
be. Could it be fixed? I don't think cups is the problem. It is common
to all software but it prints its test page correctly. Yet, I find the
problem a bit widespread!
Maybe someone with a different printer can create a similar OO doc and run the same test?
Thanks!
