Tikiman wrote:

Hello to all I am a very new user of Linux and the supplied Gimp program. I tried out my printer (Canon Pixma MG5550) in gthumb and Gimp by printing a borderless 6 x 4 photo. I changed the settings in the print tab to read Glossy photo paper and size as borderless 6 x 4 and also the orientation to suit my needs. The photo printed okay BUT there is a small border about 8mm at the top and 2mm at the bottom of the photo.in portrait style. This did not happen when I had Win XP and Arcsoft software and after checking as much as I can I am unable to locate a solution.
Does anyone know why this happens and can it be resolved?. I would appreciate some help with this please.
many thanks
Tikiman

What are the dimensions of the photo? Many digital cameras produce images with a 4:3 ratio, which doesn't exactly fit the 3:2 ratio of 6x4 paper. Either a border has to be left along the shorter edges or part of the image has to be cropped from the longer edges.

I'm not sure if that decision would be down to the software or printer driver, but either way it's possible that GIMP / Linux driver takes the former option so that no part of the image is lost, while Arcsoft / Windows driver may have taken the latter option to produce a truly borderless print at the expense of losing part of the image.

Try cropping the photo in GIMP so that it does have a 3:2 ratio before printing. Also check File > Page Setup in GIMP to ensure it is not adding margins. If that still leaves a border, I suspect it would be more down to the printer or driver rather than GIMP.

Hope that helps. Mark.

On 01/10/15 13:32, Mark Bourne wrote:

Tikiman wrote:

Hello to all I am a very new user of Linux and the supplied Gimp program. I tried out my printer (Canon Pixma MG5550) in gthumb and Gimp by printing a borderless 6 x 4 photo. I changed the settings in the print tab to read Glossy photo paper and size as borderless 6 x 4 and also the orientation to suit my needs. The photo printed okay BUT there is a small border about 8mm at the top and 2mm at the bottom of the photo.in portrait style. This did not happen when I had Win XP and Arcsoft software and after checking as much as I can I am unable to locate a solution. Does anyone know why this happens and can it be resolved?. I would appreciate some help with this please. many thanks Tikiman

What are the dimensions of the photo? Many digital cameras produce images with a 4:3 ratio, which doesn't exactly fit the 3:2 ratio of 6x4 paper. Either a border has to be left along the shorter edges or part of the image has to be cropped from the longer edges.

Actually, there is a third option, and I think it is the default for some windows applications: do an asymmetrical resize to fill the paper. You get a distorted image but apparently a lot of people don't notice. (I'm not sure if it's the default or not; I normally don't run win anything.)

I'm not sure if that decision would be down to the software or printer driver, but either way it's possible that GIMP / Linux driver takes the former option so that no part of the image is lost, while Arcsoft / Windows driver may have taken the latter option to produce a truly borderless print at the expense of losing part of the image.

I believe it's an option somewhere in the print configuration, something like "resize image to fill paper" (printer driver)

Try cropping the photo in GIMP so that it does have a 3:2 ratio before printing. Also check File > Page Setup in GIMP to ensure it is not adding margins. If that still leaves a border, I suspect it would be more down to the printer or driver rather than GIMP.

Additional note: If you're printing *with* a border, you want to resize to whatever the final aspect ratio will be, and that will depend on the actual border size. In this case the aspect ratio of the image will not be the same as the aspect ratio of the paper. For example, I print using the smallest border for my epson printer, which is 3mm: 4" = 101.6mm 101.6 - (2*3mm) = 95.6mm 6" = 152.4mm 152.4 - (2*3mm) = 146.4mm 152.4/101.6 = 3/2 = 1.5 146.4/95.6 = 1.53

Gary

Tikiman wrote:

Tikiman wrote:
What are the dimensions of the photo? Many digital cameras produce images with a 4:3 ratio, which doesn't exactly fit the 3:2 ratio of 6x4
paper. Either a border has to be left along the shorter edges or part of
the image has to be cropped from the longer edges.

I'm not sure if that decision would be down to the software or printer driver, but either way it's possible that GIMP / Linux driver takes the
former option so that no part of the image is lost, while Arcsoft / Windows driver may have taken the latter option to produce a truly borderless print at the expense of losing part of the image.

Try cropping the photo in GIMP so that it does have a 3:2 ratio before printing. Also check File > Page Setup in GIMP to ensure it is not adding margins. If that still leaves a border, I suspect it would be more down to the printer or driver rather than GIMP.

Hope that helps. Mark.

Hi Mark
I have looked at the properties of the pictures and the only detail given on size is :-
Picture width = 5152 Pixels
Picture Height = 3864 Pixels
There are no picture ratios given in properties like 3:2 or 4:3 there are a few other details but none relating to size.

I didn't make explicitly clear that the ratio I was referring to is simply the ratio of width to height. In your case, as I suspected, it's 4:3 (5152/3864 = 4/3).

I think that I will try to crop or fill the page or even increase the size of the picture to see what happens.

To crop your image to completely fill a 6x4 (i.e. 3:2 ratio) print, you'll need to make the shorter dimension 3435 pixels (5152 * 2/3 ≈ 3435). So a total of 429 pixels need to be removed; you can control how much of that comes off each side.

Resizing won't help unless, as Gary mentioned, you distort the image by stretching more in one dimension than the other. That may be an acceptable alternative if you don't want to loose anything from the edges by cropping and don't mind the slight distortion. If I was going to do that, I'd keep the shorter dimension as it is and increase the longer dimension to 5796 pixels (3/2 * 3864).

Firstly I
will create a copy to work on as I don't want to lose the original

Definitely a good idea! I usually keep the originals even once I've got the final result I want, just in case I want to go back and do something different.

Many thanks for your input
Tikiman

No problem. Hope it works for you.

Mark.

Tikiman wrote:

Hi Mark ,many thanks for the data and I have followed your information and have altered the ratio to 3:2 and the paper size remains at 4 x 6 and I am now printing on this size of photo paper corectly as it has achieved the desired result. So now that this has been resolved I will mark the post as solved with thanks to all the input from everybody. Thank you
Tikiman

Great. Thanks for posting back to let us know it worked.

Mark.