Borderless printing

Alternatively called full-bleed printing, borderless printing is a printing technique that applies ink to the entirety of the paper's surface. It leaves no unprinted margins or slug area. Borderless printing is especially useful for printing photos, or parts of a larger mosaic like a billboard or banner.

If you have a printer that supports borderless printing, you can find the borderless printing option from the printer or print properties window when you are printing an image. Many newer inkjet printers allow for borderless printing.

Advantages of borderless printing

• No trimming required.
• Easy to frame photos, as if you printed at a local photo lab.
• Makes scrapbooking easier.
• Get more from a single page of paper.

Increased size in print or edges of template cut off

Most printer drivers slightly increase the size of the image to help create a true borderless print. However, if you're working with a template that requires an exact size, this may cut off the edges of the template. To help compensate for this issue, most printer drivers allow you to adjust the "expansion" or "extension" amount in the printer settings. Increasing or decreasing the value helps fix borderless printing size issues on a commercial printer. You may have an option for "Auto expand" or "Retain size" that may correct this issue.

Another common cause for cut off is the image being smaller than the paper and the program is using an "Auto fit" option when printing. Because the program increases the size of the image to fit the page and the printer driver increases the image for borderless printing, you get cut off edges. To prevent this problem, disable or uncheck any auto fit option.

Finally, when printing from a program with margins, make sure to set all margins to 0 (zero) before printing.

Bleed, Border, Inkjet, Margin, Print area, Printer terms, Printing