Measure Twice, Cut Once

A tale of letter, A4, and other standard sizes

We did a lot of measuring and writing notes today while mocking up a custom made fine art book.

Today was a day where we spent a lot of time taking measurements, writing notes on proof prints, testing layouts, and debating various options all in the name of unifying and optimizing layouts for a book we’re making. All those activities were what we anticipated and dedicated time for. More on all those activities some other day, I want to discuss a topic that we didn’t plan to spend any time on. We should have as it’s nothing we’ve not experienced before but it’s one of those things that quickly disappears when not causing issues.

News flash; Cut sheet paper is rarely what the label says it is when it comes to size. I’ll clarify that a bit. Depending on how precise you’d care to measure those cut sheets they are usually a wee bit off. In most cases, it doesn’t matter and you’d never know that the fresh sheet you’ve just put into the printer isn’t exactly A4 sized. Our Canon 1000 printers know this, that’s why they don’t complain if the paper is a millimeter out of “spec”. At some point, those printers (as well as others) will bitterly complain and refuse to print with some sort of error message. The Canon’s have a very simply worded, very clear message along the lines of ”paper size mismatch”.

That message is usually a screw-up in paper size selection on my part when I am in a hurry. I am glad it’s there. Imagine the mayhem if the printer did what I told it to do when selecting A3+ paper and inserting a sheet of A4. The solution is easy, just change the paper size to what’s actually in the printer. As I said, the slight variance in cut sheet sizes is usually no cause for concern.

While printing various proofs today, I was greeted with that paper size error when I was absolutely sure I had selected A4 paper size. I checked and double-checked my settings. I tried to print that sheet three times and all three times it was summarily rejected, spit out, and left with the same error message. Oh, yea, I’ve seen this before… It’s got to be the paper. Sure enough, we measured it and it was not in fact A4. This sheet turned out to be a whopping 5mm shorter than what A4 should be on the short side.

Our Canon 1000 rejected the top sheet of Unryu as not A4, you can clearly see why.

Measuring a few other sheets that we’d printed earlier on the same pack of paper, they all turned out to be out of spec just not to the same degree. The Canon 1000 gladly printed on A4 that was 3mm narrower than spec moments before. At least I now have a better idea of how far out of spec a sheet has to be for the printer to complain about it. Here’s the rub; Even 3mm is too far out of spec for this particular project as this book will look too shabby if the pages are that far off. Worse, the designs we’re developing need fairly precise registration page to page.

Remediating Paper Size Inconsistencies

We’re in the prototyping and evaluation stage right now. Of course, I am going to use this sheet even at 5mm too narrow for testing. For those that may not know how to remedy the issue of printing on sheets that are not standard it’s simple. No matter if you’re trying to print on nonstandard paper you cut yourself or you're dealing with sheets that are way out of spec like we were, the answer to making the printer print is to create a custom paper size that matches the actual paper size you have.

I usually name custom paper sizes with their measurements. Trust me it’s the only way to stay organized if you’ve got more than one. This is commonplace on roll printers and far too easy to have no idea if you don’t have a good system of naming your custom sizes. Today I varied my naming system and named this one A4- to poke fun at A3+ which seems to have been hacked into the standard international system of paper sizing. Hey, why not an A4+ and an A2- etc? I wonder why they don’t hack letter, legal, tabloid, etc into the standard size scheme?

This isn’t the only problem you’re likely to run into at some point if print. This one was a problem but alerted us to devise a workflow that will be productive for this project even when the printer doesn’t reject the paper outright. We’re leaning toward cutting all the paper to size before printing as that seems to ease the rest of the workflow of assembling the book. That’s going to be our standard method of remediating minor variations in sheet size for cut sheets when we need precise sheet size and registration from one page to the next.

Other problems require differing solutions. These “minor” variations usually cause a lot of pain and suffering the larger and larger you print. In many cases, the problem is paper that is not completely square. The bigger the print the more of a problem this causes if you assume it’s perfectly square. Typically this happens with roll paper. When printing huge prints on roll paper, never assume the print is square when it comes off the printer. Measure precisely and make sure before you start down the road of all the other mounting activities. This has burned us more than once. On large prints, a little out of square is blatantly obvious when the run is 6 feet long.

More on all the measurements and this custom book project to come…