What do these options do?

They expand/shrink the page so that the entire document page fits just inside the printable page area.

For instance, if you have a US-letter-sized page with text going right to the edge, you have to shrink it slightly to fit inside the printer margins (even if you are using letter-sized paper), if you want to see all of the text. Otherwise, the text in the margins will be cut off.

Another example would be printing an A4 document onto US-letter paper. It has to be shrunk to fit.

Currently, evince has a scale option in the print dialog, but it doesn't work as expected. For instance, consider the letter-to-letter example with text in the margin areas. If you reduce the scale to 90%, it does not print the margin text. It just reduces the other text. That is, it always print the same area of the viewed page, even though reducing the scale could let it print more area.

Tested on 0.8.2.

I would love to have this feature - I sorely miss it.

- Mike

Then the "scale" option should be fixed, and we do not need "expand to page" and "shrink to page"?  

This would work for printing on a differently sized paper than the document was created for.  As for printing on the correct size of paper, why can't text be printed in the margins exactly as in the document? If this is possible, I think this is the right behavior.

The problem with printing on the correct size of paper is that each printer has its own margins. If you are lucky, the document has bigger margins than the printer does, otherwise you have to scale.

A single "fit to page" check box would probably suffice. When picked it could automatically put the right number in the "scale" box and grey it out. Just scaling isn't enough though: we have to reset the top-left printed object to be at the top-left of the printer's usable area, and similar for bottom-right. In other words, rather than just scaling page sizes, we need to map the printable area of the document onto the printable area of the printer.

(Sorry I didn't see the question in February. I didn't get an email from bugzilla at that time, though I seem to be getting them now.)

(In reply to comment #3)
> Then the "scale" option should be fixed, and we do not need "expand to page"
> and "shrink to page"?

The scale option should be fixed, yes. However, the user shouldn't have to guess what scale will make the document fit onto the paper. The computer should compute it!

 
> This would work for printing on a differently sized paper than the document was
> created for.  As for printing on the correct size of paper, why can't text be
> printed in the margins exactly as in the document? If this is possible, I think
> this is the right behavior.

The typical printer can not cover the entire sheet (although some can). For instance, on an A4 or US-letter size paper, a typical laser printer might not be able to print within 3/8" of the edge. Rather than worrying about that, it would be nice if the user could have the program automatically shrink the image slightly so that everything in the document is printed.

It should be an option, like in Adobe Acrobat. (Sometimes you really do want 1:1 scale, and no shrinkage - hence the option.)

- Mike

I'd also like this option. It's also useful if you've a latex-beamer generated presentation (100 x 80 mm) and want to print it on a4. And it is _very_ intuitive compared to scale, which does not even has a preview.

Thanks,

Jan

I just found this issue and I would like to put my vote in for it as well.  Right now, my wife has been trying to print a PDF that she received, and it's impossible because there is no margin in the PDF but our printer will not print right to the edge.

Well. Same problem. Renders Evince useless to me, even though I like it.

I just encountered this with TIFF printing. Evince prints a small image in a corner on every page and I want it to fit into the whole page. Please!

This seems to work as expected in 2.30.0. There is a now "Page Handling" tab in the print dialog, where Page Scaling can be set to "None", "Shrink to Printable Area", or "Fit to Printable Area".

Closing bug. Please re-open if 2.30.0 doesn't work for you.

- Mike