What are the minimum margins most printers can handle?
Im making a PDF to sell, creating my orignal copy from a scanned paper, then I'm going to import it to acrbat and add fields.



I want it to be printable on any printer.
The use margins of 1" all around seems like a bunch of wasted space

The govenment doc I'm working on making digital has .42 and .46 left and right margins. but when i put that into my doc it says error.
even .50 errors
I dont even have a printer installed?is that why?


i was going to do trial and error till i found the smallest but now Im not getting the error on any size and wouldn't that be based on my printer anyway.

is .50 a safe bet for most printers

Most printers can handle page margins down to 0.25in. Not having any printers installed makes it hard for Word to do any meaningful page layout, because Word relies on data from the active printer's driver for that.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

A rule of thumb for readibility is 50% white space. See p. 124 of this article for expansion:
http://www.ca7.uscourts.gov/rules/pa...with_print.pdf

That includes margins and interline spacing.

Although that article is about legal writing, it is one of the best I've seen on producing documents that are read, for any purpose. If you want people to read your documents, you would be wise to keep some substantial margins. If, on the other hand you are just wanting to throw a bunch of words at them so you can say you did it, you don't need the margins. (I'm thinking some of the warning pages that come with products.)

The limits are set by the printer driver. You can create a PDF with no white space, but when printed it will include the white space set by the printer.

An easy way to establish the limits for a particular printer is to draw a vertical line to the 'paper' edges and a horizontal line also to the 'paper' edges. Then print the document. The amount missing from the ends of the lines is the white space size.

__________________
Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com