Printing your publications from Publish by Zaweba

Plenty of jobs never leave the house. A party invitation, a notice for the village hall, a stack of raffle tickets or a dozen copies of a newsletter for the noticeboard are all things you can print yourself, and Publish by Zaweba prints straight to any printer Windows knows about.

Printing goes through the standard Windows print dialog, so you choose the printer, the number of copies and the printer's own options in the place you already know. Publish then puts the page on the paper at actual size and centred.

How the page meets the paper

Actual size means a 10 cm box on your page measures 10 cm on paper. That's what you want for business cards, tickets, labels and anything that has to fit something real. Centred means the page sits in the middle of the sheet, so an A5 flyer printed on A4 paper has an even border all round, ready to trim.

There's one exception. If the paper is smaller than the page, Publish scales the page down so it fits rather than cutting bits off. That's a safety net, not a design choice, so if you see your poster come out smaller than expected, check the paper size in the print dialog. An A3 poster printed on an A4 printer will be shrunk to fit A4.

Getting a good home print

Choose the right paper setting in the printer's options. Most printers have settings for plain paper, card and photo paper, and telling the printer what's in the tray makes a big difference to how ink or toner lands. Card for invitations and certificates, photo paper for picture-heavy flyers.

Remember that most home printers can't print to the very edge of the paper. If a background colour or a photo runs off the edge of your design, the printed sheet will have a thin white border. The usual answer is to design on a smaller page than the paper, with bleed, and trim it after printing. Because Publish centres the page, the trimming is even on every side.

Colour in Publish is RGB, which is what home printers expect, so what you see on screen is a fair guide. Screens are brighter than paper, though, so expect printed colours to look a little deeper and less luminous, especially on plain paper.

Printing merged documents

Mail merge uses the same print route. When you print merged, each record is printed in turn through the Windows dialog, so certificates, invitations or name badges with different names come out of the printer one after the other. Do a test with a few records on plain paper before loading good card, and check the first and last entries in particular.

When to use PDF instead

Printing directly is quick, but exporting a PDF first has some advantages worth knowing. A PDF lets you check every page before using paper. It's the only way to print a booklet, because File > Export booklet PDF does the page ordering that saddle-stitch needs. And it's the right thing to send to a print shop, whose machines produce better results on large runs, heavy card and full-bleed designs than most home printers can.

A good rule is to print at home for small runs on ordinary paper, and to send a print-ready PDF out for anything large, glossy, full-colour to the edge, or in big numbers.

Small habits

Print one copy before printing twenty. Hold it at arm's length and read it the way someone passing a noticeboard would. Typos, faint text and pictures that came out too dark are much easier to spot on paper than on screen, and fixing them in Publish by Zaweba before the main run saves both ink and patience.