Printing A3 PDFs to scale in Snow Leopard?

Thomas Holm — Fri, 19 May 2023 20:17:06 GMT

Having recently upgraded to Snow Leopard (I know I'm a coward), now on 10.6.4, I'm having an issue when printing PDFs from Preview: It no longer remembers or reads the embedded page setup, like it did in Leopard.
I'm now regretting I dissed Adobe Acrobat in this post: http://archicad-talk.graphisoft.com/viewtopic.php?p=157633#157633

"I find Preview and Apple's plugin (in Leopard) so much faster and more convenient than Adobe's that I only use Adobe when something embedded (like some security tricks) in the PDF requires it. For example, Adobe Reader (and Adobe Acrobat Pro in CS4) does not recognize the embedded page size of the PDF."

This is no longer true. Each time I open an A3-sized PDF with Preview, it defaults to A4 like Adobe Reader always did (which is why I ditched it in Leopard). So I change page size to A3.

But then Preview scales the output to 98%. So I have to type 100 % in the scale field. Every time I print. Since Preview in Snow Leopard doesn't have the "No page scaling" checkbox, and I have found no way of making a Standard setting that remembers everything, like page size and scaling.

I'm not sure, but the issue may be related to the fact that Appletalk is dead in Snow Leopard, and I had to re-install our FieryRIP Konica printer as a LPD printer instead. AppleTalk may have been slower, but it worked!

I may have to go back to Adobe Reader. At least i don't have to type 100% every time!

This is so frustrating. I'm telling myself I must have overlooked something! Does anybody have an idea on how to make a 100% (non)scaled A3 option as a selectable standard?

Re: Printing A3 PDFs to scale in Snow Leopard?

Thomas Holm — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:28:52 GMT

OK. I guess I have to return to the old habit of answering my own posts. I googled a bit more, and finally I hit the right combination of search phrases:

Mactricsandtips describes this workaround:

Open Terminal in Applications > Utilities and copy and paste the following:
defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode 0
After hitting enter this will set Scale to 100% as the default option within Preview. You'll still be able to select “Scale To Fit” should you want to. You can test the results by restarting Preview.
If you want to disable “Auto Rotate”, copy and paste the following into Terminal.
defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingAutoRotate 0
Once again, restart Preview and the results should take effect.
If you want to reset this option simply copy and paste the following code into Terminal.
defaults delete com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode;
defaults delete com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingAutoRotate
This will delete the preference files and return Preview to the original state.
A simple trick which I am sure some of you will find useful. This trick works in Snow Leopard, so your mileage may vary with older operating systems. If you want to learn more about Terminal either use the related links below this post. I also recommend Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual and Mac OS X for Unix Geeks, both are great books.

I'm still wondering why Snow Leopard can't read embedded page sizes, while Leopard could - if somebody knows, please post!

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Printing A3 PDFs to scale in Snow Leopard?

Re: Printing A3 PDFs to scale in Snow Leopard?