Blurry text when printing with page setup to print borderless

[Carmenland]

Hi All,

I've been printing booklets in InDesign for a while and wondering why the text always comes out slightly blurry. I just noticed by accident that apparently it's perfectly capable of printing normal looking text if the page is set to A4 (as opposed to A4 borderless).

Anybody got any idea why that is and how to fix it? Is it even an InDesign/ Adobe problem, or just something to do with my printer? The slightly blurry text is less of a problem than the white border, so it's not the end of the world. It just annoys me, even more so now I know it doesn't have to be that way... Thanks!

[Mike Witherell]

What printer?

What happens when you export to PDF and print from Acrobat (which is preferred by most ID users)?

[Carmenland]

It's a Canon iX6550. When I print from a pdf it's slightly less blurry (good call, ta!), but still nowhere near as sharp and black as on the borderless-less (borderfull?) print.

[John Mensinger]

I can't say I know exactly what's behind your problem, but I strongly suspect this isn't really an InDesign issue, seeing as InDesign can't really "know" (or be affected by) whether the borderless option in your printer driver is enabled or not.

That said, Mike's advice is correct; printing directly from InDesign brings potential pitfalls that just aren't there when you print a PDF from Acrobat. I make my living producing InDesign documents, and I can't remember the last time I printed directly from InDesign.

If the output is that much better when borderless is unslected, I'd want to look into how Canon says its borderless printing is implemeted vs. normal printing. There may be some interpolative process involved. Perhaps this thread has some clues:

https://community.usa.canon.com/t5/Printer-Multifunction-Support/Borderless-printing-washes-out-imag...

[Carmenland]

Yes, I'm beginning to see why! I just started teaching myself InDesign a few months ago and hadn't completely wrapped my head around the whole exporting business yet. If it's a printer problem, though, I just don't know why it would ever print sharp text...

Thanks for the advice, y'all!

[John Mensinger]

If it's a printer problem, though, I just don't know why it would ever print sharp text...

That would make sense, but it's not a printer (hardware) problem, it's a problem with the way Canon print drivers process "borderless" output, and a lot of Canon users are encountering the exact same issue you describe. I turned up plenty of evidence with a couple searches that took a couple minutes. Look into it further.

For what it's worth, borderless printing is somewhat of a "hack," and not really rooted in professional technique. Printer designers found a way to do it, but it's frought with potential niggles in both the software and the hardware. The right way to print to the edge of a page is to print beyond it (bleed), and trim.

[Carmenland]

Makes sense, just hadn't occurred to me yet to look to Canon for answers. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!