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I am using a PC with Windows 10 connected to a Brother HL L2320D Printer. At the beginning I simply used the default printer driver in Windows (as I did not download and install any driver from the Brother printer website), however, I found the printer did not print A4 documents in the correct size, the documents tended to automatically shrink by around 5%, leaving an unexpected margin on the left and bottom.

Then I tried to download the printer driver from Brother website, installed it and replaced the original driver. The problem was rectified when the documents were printed on paper.

But then when I tried to generate a PDF file from an A4 sized Word document (I am using Word 365) using a free PDF driver, the resulting PDF was in the wrong size -- the PDF size became 21.59 x 27.94cm (which is the size of Letter instead), and worse still, the contents were shrinked once again by around 5%. If the page had a colored background, a 1cm margin was clearly seen on both the left and right sides.

I checked the Printer Property settings from the and Word Print settings, both were set as A4 already. The stranger part was, I tried different PDF printer driver software, such as Microsoft Print to PDF (which was available in Windows 10), FlexiPDF, PDF Creator, all of them had the same problem, the only exception was PDF Architect 8, which could generate the correct A4-sized PDFs without shrinking the content.

Thinking it might be these PDF drivers were affected by the default printer driver as I installed them before correcting the problem I mentioned in the first paragraph, I uninstalled the PDF driver software and re-installed them again, but the same problem still exists. What can I do to correct this problem?

GreenPenguin
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2 Answers2

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I just found out the reason why. Although in the Print dialog the printer drivers always show the paper used is A4, but when I go to Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Devices and Printers, and right click on the Printer Driver and Select "Printer Properties", the "Paper Available" box still shows "Letter".

What I have to do is to click on "Preference" there, go to "Advanced" and set Paper Size as A4 there (it looks the same as the one in the Printer Dialog). After doing so, the driver generates PDF correctly.

I tried to do this for these drivers: Microsoft Print to PDF, FlexiPDF and PDF Creator. All work fine now (although the "Paper Available" box may still show "Letter" in the case of Microsoft Print to PDF and FlexiPDF, while in PDF Creator, the "Paper Available" box becomes empty).

GreenPenguin
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In Windows 11 nothing actually helped but direct edit of MPDW-PDC.xml. The final goal is to move "default" attribute from Letter to A4 (If we want to change producing pdf from Letter to A4).

Please see screenshots. File and container directory permissions do not include user or administrator so to edit you want to change ownership first and then add permissions. enter image description here

Niksr
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