How to print at actual size

Published October 8, 2026. Print-dialog labels are taken from each program's own documentation or source code (sources).

Short answer: in the print dialog, set the scale to Actual size, 100% or (in Chrome) Default, never "Fit to page", "Fit to printable area" or "Shrink to fit", and load paper of the same size as the PDF. Then measure something of known length on the printout. Every sheet from this site has a calibration bar for that: it should be exactly 4 in long on inch paper and 10 cm on metric paper.

Why printouts come out small

Most printers can't put ink right to the edge of the paper. A "fit" option shrinks the page until all of it lands inside the area the printer can reach, which for a full-page grid means everything gets smaller. Mismatched paper is the other common cause: A4 is 5.9 mm narrower and 17.6 mm taller than Letter, so a Letter PDF printed on A4, or the reverse, is either shrunk to fit or cropped. A shrink is easy to miss on a single square and obvious over a page:

Fit-to-printable-area scales are for a full Letter sheet with the same unprintable margin on every side; real printers vary, and some have a wider margin at one edge. Paper-size scales use the ISO 216 and US Letter sizes.

Two other settings scale pages without saying so. Pages per sheet (2-up, 4-up) shrinks every page to fit its share of the paper. Borderless printing, on printers that offer it, deliberately prints the page slightly larger than the paper so that no white edge is left; Canon's manuals, for example, describe an adjustable "amount of extension" for it.

Settings for each program

Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader

1. Open the PDF and choose File, then Print.
2. Under Page Sizing & Handling, click Size and choose Actual size.
3. Check that the paper size in Page Setup or the printer's properties matches the PDF.

Adobe describes the alternatives: Fit reduces or enlarges each page to fit the printable area; Shrink oversized pages shrinks only pages larger than the paper; Custom Scale uses a percentage you type. The PDFs from this site carry the PDF standard's PrintScaling preference set to None, which asks the viewer to preselect no scaling, and the preference to pick the paper tray by page size. Acrobat honours both, but check the dialog anyway.

Google Chrome

1. Open the PDF in Chrome and press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac), or click Print on the generator.
2. Open More settings.
3. Set Paper size to the PDF's size and Pages per sheet to 1.
4. Set Scale to Default, or Custom with 100. For a PDF, Chrome also offers "Fit to printable area", which shrinks the page into the printable area, and "Fit to paper"; avoid both.
5. Leave Print as image off; it turns the page into a picture before printing.

Chrome remembers the scale, paper size and margins you used last time, so a "fit" chosen for some other document will still be selected the next time. Check it every time you print paper that has to be to scale.

Microsoft Edge

Edge's print dialog works like Chrome's. Microsoft lists three scale choices: "Fit to printable area", "Actual size" and a custom percentage (open More settings if Scale isn't showing). Choose Actual size, and set Pages per sheet to 1.

Mozilla Firefox

1. Press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) and open More settings.
2. Under Scale, choose the percentage option and enter 100, not Fit to page width.
3. Set Pages per sheet to 1 and choose the right paper size.

Firefox's built-in PDF viewer prints each page as an image, at 150 dots per inch unless that setting has been changed. The scale is still right at 100%, but very fine lines, such as a 0.25 pt millimetre grid, can print softer and heavier than in the PDF. For the crispest fine grids, print from a dedicated PDF reader or use the generator's own Print button.

Safari and Preview on a Mac

In the print dialog, look for the Scale setting (in Preview it is in the Preview section of the dialog) and enter 100%. Don't choose Scale to Fit, which enlarges or shrinks the page to fill the paper. Check that Paper Size matches the PDF; if the dialog shows few options, expand it to see them all.

The printer's own settings

The Properties or Preferences button in a print dialog opens the printer driver, which may have its own page layout or scaling options, such as fit-to-page, a percentage or borderless printing. Set them to normal size, 100% and bordered printing, or the driver will scale the page after the program has sent it at the right size.

Phones and tablets

Mobile print screens offer few settings and often no scale control at all. Print one page, measure the bar, and if it is off, print from a computer instead.

Checking a printout with the ruler

1. Use a good steel or wooden rule rather than a worn plastic one, and read it straight on, not at an angle.
2. Line up the rule's zero mark with the bar's 0 tick; on many rules the zero is not at the very end.
3. Read where the bar's last tick falls: 4 in on inch paper, 10 cm on metric paper.
4. Measure the other direction too. The bar checks the width; for the height, measure a long run of squares. On the starting Letter sheet, 40 rows of 1/4 in squares should span exactly 10 in; on the starting A4 sheet, 54 rows of 5 mm should span 270 mm.

How to read the result:

• Exactly 4 in (or 10 cm): the page printed at true size.
• About 3 3/4 to 3 7/8 in (or 94 to 97 mm on the 10 cm bar): something scaled the page. Look for a fit option, 2 pages per sheet, borderless printing or mismatched paper.
• Within about 1/32 in (or 1 mm): that is the printer's own small error, explained below. 1% of 4 in is 0.04 in, a little more than 1/32 in; 1% of 10 cm is 1 mm.

For comparison, fitting a full Letter page inside a 1/4 in unprintable margin scales it to 94.1%, so the 4 in bar prints at 3.76 in: a difference of almost 1/4 in that no printer error explains.

Why 100% can still be about 1% off

An office printer is not a measuring instrument. Even with every scaling option off, a few things move the image slightly:

• Mechanical tolerances. Rollers, drums and belts move the paper and form the image, and a patent on improving laser-printer accuracy puts typical print engines at plus or minus 1%.
• The paper itself. Paper swells as it absorbs moisture and shrinks as it dries, more across the grain than along it. A laser printer's fuser heats and dries each sheet, and inkjet ink wets it. One production printer maker's manual notes that image position accuracy depends on temperature, humidity and the paper used, and provides separate magnification adjustments for the feed direction and across it.
• Borderless modes, as above, enlarge the page on purpose.

Correcting a printer that is consistently off

If the same printer, paper and settings always give the same small error, you can compensate with a custom scale: divide the length the bar should be by what it measured and multiply by 100. A 4 in bar that measures 3 31/32 in needs 4 ÷ 3.96875 × 100 = 100.8%. Type that into the Custom Scale box, print again and re-measure. A custom scale changes both directions equally, so if the error is in one direction only, correct for the direction that matters most to your drawing. Print a test page again whenever you change printer, paper or tray.

Generating the paper to exact size is the part this site controls. The methodology page explains how each sheet is drawn in points so that a PDF printed at 100% is exactly to size, and the graph paper sizes guide covers which spacing to choose.

Sources

1. Adobe, Acrobat help on page sizing in the Print dialog: Fit, Actual size, Shrink oversized pages and Custom Scale.
2. Chromium source code: print preview labels (More settings, Scale, Default, Fit to printable area, Fit to paper, Paper size, Pages per sheet, Print as image), how each scale option prints a PDF, and the settings print preview remembers.
3. Microsoft Support, Print in Microsoft Edge: Fit to printable area, Actual size and custom scaling.
4. Firefox source code, print dialog labels (More settings, Scale, Fit to page width), and pdf.js, viewer options (print resolution of 150 dpi).
5. Apple Support, Print PDFs and images in Preview on Mac: Scale and Scale to Fit.
6. Canon, Specifying the Amount of Extension for Borderless Printing.
7. Konica Minolta, Adjustment: Image Position (AccurioPrint 2100 manual): dependence on temperature, humidity and paper, and feed- and cross-direction magnification adjustments.
8. US Patent 5,815,187, Method for improving the dimensional accuracy of laser printers (1998): typical print-engine accuracy of plus or minus 1%.
9. ISO 32000-1:2008, the PDF standard: the PrintScaling and PickTrayByPDFSize viewer preferences.
10. ISO 216:2007: A4 is 210 × 297 mm. US Letter is 8.5 × 11 in (215.9 × 279.4 mm).