Last august I struggled with borders. Well, same thing happend again.

I was printing my xmas cards and printed two images in one A4 sheet. Now I was a little wiser than in august and got me a solution playing with borderless printing and margins.

I have an enhancement request. Maybe not for Qimage, but for Ultimate? Maybe this is not the right place, but here it is anyway:

Why not introduce separate borders for all four borders? For example sometimes you may want to have the bottom border a little bigger than the others. And for my xmas cards it would have solved the problem.

The diagram for my xmas cards is attached.

/fox (older again)

That's what I also thought yesterday. This morning I started to play with margins and other variables involved. And I managed to get a satisfactory result. It may not be accurate in terms of millimeters (because Epson does not tell what is the difference between Min. Mid and Max Enlargement with Borderless) but it is good enough for my purposes.

Auto cropping:   On
Borderless:        On, Expansion: Min
Borders:            1=5mm, 2=5mm

Margins:

Left     Top   Right  Bottom

Fixed        0,000   0,000   0,070   0,070

Additional  0,000   1,000   1,000   2,000

Total        0,000   1,000   1,070   2,070

See attachment.

/(young again) Fox

I thought that the first picture in the first post would show what I wanted. Sorry that it was not clear enough.

Thx for your help. This exercise has been useful to me, still.

RM is Fixed=3.034mm, Additional=-8mm, Total -4.966mm
All others Additonal=0, Total 2.963mm (bottom 3.034mm)

This gave me hope because the right hand side of the print looks ok to me. (after changing all border colors to white).


You cannot change the margins in the Epson driver. According to the manual you can do it in Mac, but not in Win, which I have.


I think not. Otherwise there would not be problem at all. Attachment shows how the margins and borders should come out in this case.

I have come to the conclusion that my "problem" cannot be solved within Qimage.

/old Fox

Last attachment here:

Hi,

You are right about the distortion with borderless. Thinking the way borderless is achieved, this is obvious.

I tried your suggestions (no borderless, print cropping on) and got the same result as you. However, there are the Epson physical margins which should be cut away.

I found out that there are also Page Margins within Qimage. So I changed the right margin to -8m giving total right margin -4.966mm. The result was promising (attach 1, qimage11.gif).
Next I changed all four Page Margins to -8mm. The preview in Qimage looked still promising. See the white lines indicating the boundary of "image" to be printed (attach 2, qimage12.gif).
However the Epson Print Preview looks nearly the same as with default Page Margins. (attach 3, qimage13.gif).

Even more puzzled

/old Fox

I suppose my problem should be possible to solve with Qimage. Qimage "knows" the Epson physical margins. All it has do is to include them when calculating the final output.

B1 = B2 = 5mm as you figured. (there should be colons in my text, maybe they show up different in your screen).

Anyway, thx for quick answer(s), I'll have to study them more later this week.

/old Fox

ps. the same post has been in Steve's Digicams' Qimage Support Forum two weeks now, no replies, 184 views (now)...

This is my first post here. I have been using Qimage some time now.Basicly I am happy with the product. However a couple of times I have torn my grey hairs. My knowledge of Qimage is still far from good, so some of the problems have been caused by this.

Here is one problem which I encountered the other day and I have not found a solution to it. The problem will probably pop up for me some day again and maybe somebody else has had too.

The other day I printed some photos with my Epson 3800. I planned to print four images to A4 sheet and then use my trimmer paper cutter to cut one sheet to four photos.

Because I had quite many photos I planned to make it easy. So I planned to use the paper cutter only three times per A4 sheet (one cut to halve the A4 and then same again with the two halves) ending with 4 photos from one A4.

I like to have white borders in my photos. I knew that Qimage has option to include white borders "automatically". This is where the troubles came. No matter what I tried I did not get even borders to my photos, so I ended up using the paper cutter a lot.

Afterwards I examined the task more closely, and I found out that it was not easy at all. There are a lot of variables involved (basically in two pieces of software: Qimage and the Epson driver).

Here is what I wanted to do:



The size of A4 is 297x210 mm. That makes 148.5x105 mm per image. Using 10 mm border in each side leaves 128,5x85 mm (ratio 1.511765) for the image itself. The originals were 1.5 in ratio, so I had to crop them a bit to get ratio 1.511765.
I used Qimage Professional Edition (version 2009.268) with :
- Custom size 2 col x 2 rows
- Auto Cropping: Off
- Print Orientation: Unlock
- Borders: B
- Border 1: 5mm
- Border 2: 5mm
In the Epson driver I had:
- Source: Sheet
- Borderless: Yes
- Size: A4
- Page Layout: Layout: Output Paper: Same as Paper Size

This is the best I could produce. The borders are not the same in each side, however.



The borders shown in the output from Epson Print Preview are exactly the same as in the actual print (the colours are not).

Here I used different colours for the borders to show the problem. In the final print the border colors are all white.

As you can see the borders are not the same:
1) In the top there is a small white border (0.5mm).
2) In the center there is a white border (1.5mm).
3) The bottom border is cropped (1mm).
4) In the left there is very small whiter border (less than 0.5 mm, hardly visible in the screen)

There is an option in Qimage I also tried. Page Formatting -> Borderless Overspray/Expansion -> Disable. This seemed to cancel the borderless option in the Epson driver and result was worse than above.

It is possible to change to the Amount Enlargement for the borderless print (Main -> Paper Settings -> Expansion). Changing the Expansion from Max (factory setting) to Mid or Min, gave also worse result in my case.

So that leaves the question: Is it possible to have exactly the same borders in 4 images in one sheet?

(I would not like to start calculating and including the borders in actual images itself).