Re: [Gimp-user] print business card

[Akkana Peck <akkana shallowsky com>]

Wrenchman writes:
> anyway I ran into a problem making mine own homemade business-cards, and that is
> that the front and the back do not perfectly overlap when printed.
>
> I'm trying to push everything a little bit by chance and then hoping for the
> best, using a lot of draft paper, but it's still off by about 2 mm on the print.
>
> I see one solution would be to make a larger bleeding area, as of now I have
> zero bleeding area, but I would rather like to understand how to make a perfect
> overlap.

Unfortunately that's usually a function of the printer. Even the
professional business card printers usually require a fairly large
bleed area, and once I saw that I felt less annoyed with my home
printer for being inconsistent.

> more specifically: Horizontally the overlap seems perfect; Vertically it's off
> by 2 mm
>
> also I discovered that when you print the front and then turn the paper around
> and put it back in the printer everything turns opposite so that what was
> printed on the left side of the paper is now printed on the right side.

The easiest way to solve this is to have a template file. For
instance, you can put guides, both horizontal and vertical, where you
expect the card images to be. Draw lines along the guides and print
to check the alignment; repeat until they're where you want them,
then turn off the layer with the lines, leaving only the guides,
and save as businesscard-template.xcf. Then start with that when
you're designing a new set of cards.

I used to do that, but I found that my printer was so inconsistent
about how it fed the paper that it lined up very differently each
time. I decided it was easier just to make an image and send it to a
printing service, with dimensions and bleed area as specified by the
service; each company seems to use different values, so I need to
make a template that's specific to a particular printing company.

        ...Akkana