Printing from Paint by Zaweba with a live page preview
File > Print in Paint by Zaweba shows a live preview with paper, scale, anchor, margins, borderless and crop marks, and can save the same pages as PDF.
Printing a picture should be the easy part, yet it is where a lot of good work ends up cropped wrongly or shrunk into a corner. File > Print in Paint by Zaweba, on Ctrl+P, puts a live page preview beside every option, so you see exactly what will come out before you spend paper and ink.
Paper, orientation and size
You can choose any paper size your printer offers or set a custom one, plus portrait or landscape. Then decide how the picture meets the page. Fit scales it to fit inside the printable area without cropping. Fill covers the page and crops what doesn't fit. Actual size prints at the document's real dimensions, which matters for anything that must measure correctly, such as a template, a label or a pattern. Custom scale and custom size let you set it precisely yourself.
The preview updates with each choice, so the difference between fit and fill on an awkwardly shaped photo is obvious at a glance.
Position, margins and borderless
A 9-point anchor places the picture at a corner, an edge or the centre, and offsets nudge it from there. That is how you leave room for a hand-written note on a card, or position a small print on a large sheet so it can be trimmed easily. Margins set the space around the edges, and borderless removes them if your printer supports edge-to-edge printing.
Multiple pages and copies
If the document has artboards, you can print all of them as pages. A set of greeting cards, a portfolio of artboards or a short run of posters can go out in one job. Copies sets how many of each. Greyscale prints without colour, handy for proofs and for saving colour ink.
Crop marks, a border and a caption are available too. Crop marks show where to cut. A border adds a thin frame. The caption can label prints so a stack of proofs doesn't get mixed up.
Print One Copy and Save as PDF
Print One Copy uses your last settings and skips the dialog. Once you have set up a size and layout you like, it makes printing the next picture a single command.
Save as PDF writes the same pages to a PDF rather than the printer. Use it to send a print-ready file to a photo lab, to check a layout on another computer, or to keep a record of exactly what was printed.
Colour management and hard proofing
Print can apply colour management using your printer and paper profiles, and hard proofing prints a simulation of another output on your own printer, for instance to see roughly how a picture will look from a commercial press. Both are worth learning if colour accuracy matters to you, and they work with the same profiles set up in Edit > Colour Settings.
Avoiding the usual mistakes
Check the resolution before printing big. A small web image printed at A3 will look soft however good the printer is. Use actual size when measurements matter, and fit or fill only when they don't. If your printer adds its own scaling in its driver settings, turn that off so the two don't fight.
Do a small test on plain paper when you change paper type or size. With a live preview in Paint by Zaweba you will rarely be surprised, but a test page costs less than a sheet of fine art paper.
For a page of several small prints, such as passport photos or wallet sizes, Picture Package is the quicker route, and it hands a ready-made document straight back to this print dialog.
