Before you start the batch printing, you will want to set how the images should be printed on the paper. To set the printing options, click the Printing Options tab on the Job Setup page of the main window, as shown in Figure 12-1.

Figure 12-1. Setting Up the Printing Options

Most inexpensive printers cannot print on the whole paper. There is a margin on each side of the page where the printer can not print, and therefore this area will always be empty. In these printers, the image will not be printed on the upper left corner of the page. Instead, the image will be shifted a little bit right and down. The shift is exactly the same as the size of the top and left margins. This is a physical limitation. If your printer has a nonprintable area, you have to live with this problem, or get another printer that can print on the entire paper.

PPP provides you a solution, which makes printing less painfull on printers that can not print on the full page. The Page use options determine how your printer should treat the non-printable area of the page. You can choose from the following options:

• Use printable area. This is the regular printing option. The upper left corner of the image will be printed to the upper left corner of the printable area of the page. If your printer can not print on the whole page, your image will be shifted to the right and down.

• Use entire paper. This is a special printing mode, which eliminates the shifting caused by the non-printable margins. There is a price, however, to be paid when using this option -- PPP compensates the shift of the printer by a crop. It means that the top and the left side of the image will be cropped. PPP will crop exactly as much of the top and the left of the image as the size of the non-printable top and left margins of the printer.

If you are printing full page images and you want to be sure that the image is in the correct position, you should compensate for the printer's shifting by a crop. In this case, check the Use entire paper option, but be very careful, because some portions of the image may be cropped. In all the other cases, check the regular Use printable area option, which will never crop the top or the left of the image. It may, however, crop the right and the bottom side of the image, if it sticks out of the printable area.

Use the Scaling options to instruct PPP to scale your images. Select one of the following:

• Print 1:1. If this option is selected, PPP will not resize the images. They will be printed without downscale or blowup.
• Fit page. If you check this option, PPP will scale the images so that they fit the entire paper (if Use entire paper is selected) or the whole printable area (if Use printable area is selected).
• Custom scale. Check this option to specify any arbitrary horizontal and vertical scaling. Specify the scaling in percentage.

Tips:

• If you are printing documents where the precise alignment is a must, select the Use entire paper and Print 1:1 options.
• If you are printing documents where the image must fill the printable area of the page and crop is not allowed, check the Use printable area and Fit page options.

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