Strange & Weird Printing Problem On Mac - Please Help!

[Bazzy]

Hi All,

I am running High Sierra 10.13.6 on my 2011 MBP. Whenever I try to print or save as pdf any email, there are issues whereby a sentence is split into two & the top half is at the bottom of one page & the bottom half is on the top of the next page!

Printing & saving as PDF was set to A4. I then changed to A4 Borderless. I also selected “Scale To Fit Paper-Size” from the Paper Handling Option. I tried reducing the scale.

None of the above ever worked & no matter what I try, it still splits a sentence in two between one page & another. I also noticed that the printing font size is just massive compared to how tiny it is on screen which means documents end up being much bigger & this a real pain when it comes to printing as it means using way more paper.

Please kindly see attached screen-shot to see exactly what is happening:

Has anyone experienced this? If anyone can please very kindly tell me how to deal & fix this issue, I would be super grateful as it is driving me insane!

Many Kind Thanks!
Bazzy

 

[Bazzy]

Hi All,

Can anyone please kindly help & advise - I need to print some important stuff & cannot present printing like this - I would be most grateful!

Thank You!

 

[MBAir2010]

this is a printer settings or a setting in page margins in the pdf document, this happened to an office were i worked years ago, we reset the print preview and printed 1 sheet per time.
i hope this helps!

 

[Bazzy]

apple does not print important stuff, only pdf in cymx formats
kidding!
what are we trying to print?

Hi!

Thanks for replying! It is mainly emails - some of them quite long.

In addition to trying what I wrote in my starting post, I also saved the emails from the "Export As PDF" option from the File Menu as well as selecting "Print" & then saving as PDF from the sub-menu at the bottom. Sometimes these two options also produce very different and/or blank results between each other?

I also went to my gmail account & tried to save the emails as PDF & print directly from there via a number of different options including downloading as original but still get the sentences split into two.

I normally write emails via Apple Mail using Verdana size 17 font (using a 17" MBP) & it is just about readable to me without having to squint but whenever then printing any emails, the resulting text size is way bigger which really wastes so much paper.

I have tried on a number of different Printers - an Epson All in One Inkjet, a Samsung Laser Printer & two different HP Laser Printer models but still get exactly the same results.

I tried my best to see if there was any way to adjust the printing margins or adjusting font size when saving emails to PDF but could not find any - only to adjust paper from A4 to A4 Borderless but that did not help.

Just to let you know, whenever I write documents in MS Word for Mac or Apple Pages, this issue does not happen - only when trying to print emails from saving them as PDF as far as I know.

Hope that provides some decent info!

Many Kind Thanks!

 

[MBAir2010]

you could adjust the percentage size on the pdf
i would find out what the problem is by print preview just one page to see if there are spaces between sentences.
if everything looks good, then tinker with the printer settings.
there also can be a glitch in the pdfs were they are not set correctly.

 

[Bazzy]

this is a printer settings or a setting in page margins in the pdf document, this happened to an office were i worked years ago, we reset the print preview and printed 1 sheet per time.
i hope this helps!

Hi!

Thanks for this - can you tell me how to reset the "Print Preview" Please?

Do you know if it is possible to manually set the page margins on a mac when creating a PDF & will it do any good?

Many Thanks!

 

[MBAir2010]

you cannot reset "print preview", that was to see if the printer of document is the cause of the sentence error.
does the document look good in print preview?

 

[Bazzy]

you could adjust the percentage size on the pdf
i would find out what the problem is by print preview just one page to see if there are spaces between sentences.
if everything looks good, then tinker with the printer settings.
there also can be a glitch in the pdfs were they are not set correctly.

Hi!

I have pretty much tried all that but no joy - changing the percentage does nothing - just keeps the split sentences but on a smaller scale.

I have tried to tinker with the printer settings on all printers but again no joy. I read online that a possible solution was to select a bigger paper size than teh one actually being used & then select "Scale To Fit" from the "Page Layout & Paper Handling" options & then try printing but yet again, the split sentences remain - although sometimes they are now well within the document/page.

How does one exactly set up the PDF's properly as I can find no way to adjust them - MacOS applies all the settings by itself.

Many Thanks!
[doublepost=1551974725][/doublepost]

you cannot reset "print preview", that was to see if the printer of document is the cause of the sentence error.
does the document look good in print preview?

Hi,

No, in print preview, one can clearly see where sentences are split into two

Many Thanks!

 

[MBAir2010]

the document is messed up then
do not go crazy with the printer settings.

 

[Fishrrman]

Change font size.
Change header and footer settings.
Use the "insert page break" option if you have one available.

 

[Bazzy]

the document is messed up then
do not go crazy with the printer settings.

Hi,

They are just emails that have been sent & received so I am a bit lost - it is MacOS that sets the parameters as to how it prints emails & sets up PDF's & I do not know how to adjust things! Do you know how may I ask?

Many Thanks!
[doublepost=1551984330][/doublepost]

Change font size.
Change header and footer settings.
Use the "insert page break" option if you have one available.

Hi!

Thanks kindly for replying as well!

No matter what font size I change the emails to - tried all the way from miniscule 8 to 18, when saving as a PDF or actually printing, the font size of the written text is always much, much bigger & I am lost as to how to correct this - can you help please?

It is not possible change heading & footer settings when saving as PDF or printing emails - do you know a way?

How & where do I insert page breaks on emails sent/received & how would one determine where to do so on a long email considering the font, margin & page size issues as I would have no way of knowing from an email where one page would start on A4 paper than another?

Can you kindly give me a step by step process please?

Many Thanks!

 

[MBAir2010]

Are the documents email texts?
If you comtrol the original texts, you can fix the document,
if the document from someone else, that might be a problem

 

[Bazzy]

Are the documents email texts?
If you comtrol the original texts, you can fix the document,
if the document from someone else, that might be a problem

Hi,

They are a mix of mails sent by me with corresponding responses from the other party in this case (need for legal purposes) but the issue is with all email - whether sent or received.

I have tried using a number of different text sizes but no joy at all.

I wonder why no one else has noticed this before since many must either save emails as PDF's and/or print emails?

Many Thanks!

 

[organicCPU]

Printing emails has always been a hassle, at least if you need a correct layout of text and image.

If just the text is important for you, select the email(s) and Save as… (Cmd + Shift + S) plain or formatted text, open the file in TextEdit or another editor, set font with a paper saving size and print.

If the layout is not really important, but you need images and text and just want to overcome that line splitting, you should try Thunderbird or some other email client, as it might be able to handle printing of those emails to PDF in a better way.

Consider email a bit like a web page, if it comes to multipart html formatted emails. Apple Mail App isn´t really good in rendering that html to printed versions as the internal parsing for that seems to be a bit underdeveloped. Additionally there is endless different, sometimes even malformed, html code, that different email clients are producing. So indeed the printing task can get demanding.
However, it´s also possible to parse the extracted email´s html part or the emlx file directly from ~/Library/Mail/V4. There are third-party emlx to PDF converters. As I don´t have any use for that, I can´t recommend a specific solution.

So far I just needed to present own email creations as a PDF. My solution is to render the plain html and css in Firefox before I make an email of it and then use the commercial Adobe Acrobat Add-on to get some PDF output that´s quite nice. As you don´t code your email, you could reverse engineer (probably base64) your email and write a css stylesheet to make something similar work. Sounds like much effort, though it´s possible.