Obvious page misalignment problems when printing

[Philippe A.]

At home I have a Brother HL2040 Laser printer which I have been using for a
year now. It is hooked on a Windows machine and I print on it from my Linux
system. My distro is FC6.

A while back, I have noticed alignment problems but didn't pay too much
attention. I have reinstalled my distro from scratch recently and decided to
give this problem another look.

First I reinstalled the Brother drivers and printed a test page in Cups. The
result is perfect. Page border is misaligned by 1 millimeter vertically and
horizontally. The reason for this error could be mechanical.

Then I went in OpenOffice Writer (2.0.4). I created a simple test document.
Its page has a 2cm margin on every side and is surrounded by a 1pt border.
My expectation: the border should appear at exactly 2cm of every edge on the
printed page. The result? You can tell with your eyes the page border isn't
centered. I measured the distance from the page edges to the printed border:


left: 2.1cm
right: 1.3cm
top: 1.6cm
bottom: 2.3cm

Next I exported the document as a PDF. I went in Adobe Reader (7.0.9-1) and
printed it. The result again has obvious errors. The measurements:

left: 2.7cm
right: 1.3cm
top: 1.6cm
bottom: 2.3cm

I took the same PDF in kpdf (3.5.6-4.fc6) and printed it. The result is
identical to acroread.

Finally, I took the PDF to the Windows machine and printed it. The result?
Perfect. Off by 1mm horizontally.

I gave other Linux drivers a try. First the HL2060 driver:
- the test page has no printer margin
- identical problems in OO and acroread

I also tried a modified HL1250 driver (http://www.profv.de/brother/):
- the test page prints perfectly (the imageable area is larger than the one
defined by Brother by a matter of mm).
- identical problems in OO and acroread

One last note about acroread. I was printing with the following options:
- Page scaling: none. Using fit/reduce to printer margin squeezes the page
further, apparently by the value of printer margins.
- auto rotate & scale: yes

I'd like someone to tell me what the origin of this problem could be. Could
it be fixed? I don't think cups is the problem. It is common to all software
but it prints its test page correctly. Yet, I find the problem a bit
widespread!

Maybe someone with a different printer can create a similar OO doc and run
the same test?

Thanks!
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-list/attachments/20070318/d1404f9e/attachment-0001.htm>