Printing seems offset

[Stephanie5C67]

I'm printing trading cards that I designed in Illustrator. The cards are 2.5” x 3.5” and they have a front and back to them. When I move the cards into in design I set the size to 2.5” x 3.5”. The bleed is set to like 0.5” and no slug. When printing the cards I notice that one side is slightly higher than the other not by much but, just enough to cut a word. Is this an in-design issue and if so how can I fix it? Sorry for the poor grammar.

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

When you import your .AI files into InDesign, make sure you are using the appropriate Crop options for your cards. Check the box for "Show import options" when you place the file. Most likely, if you want to match the artboard and bleed you have now in Illustrator, select Bleed, otherwise Trim or Crop will do if you don't have any bleed. This setting tends to stick, so any future imports will use what was set previously.

Speaking of bleed, why do you have such a large Bleed set. .5" is excessive.

[Stephanie5C67]

Thanks for the answer. I'll give that a try and report back. As far as the why.5” bleed I only just started printing cards. So novice chalk it up to inexperience. 

[Stephanie5C67]

I imported the ai file with the options/layout/settings from illustrator. Saw the preview thought all was well. When I printed the card out I ran onto the same issue. The only other thing that I think it could be is my printer.

It's kind of old and I lately I have been having to push a page into the rollers to get the print process started otherwise it'll give me an error saying there is no paper in the tray. I have attached an image this time of me holding the paper the up to light so you can see what I'm talking about. 

It's a little difficult to see but you can see how the front part of card (full player) is a bit higher than back (close up face). Any other ideas or tips would be great! 

[pictures removed by moderator]

[Stephanie5C67]

@Sil.C  please remove the pictures i posted with this post. The ones i meant to post had the sensitive info (name, etc.) blotted out. Please help by taking the pictures down immediately 

[Peter Spier]

How are you printing the cards? If you're doing it yourself on a home or office printer the problem may simply be the printer tolerances. Consumer-level printers use feed rollers rahter than paper grippers to move the paper stock into the machine and typically have positional tolerances of around +/- 1/8 inch. Many inkjet printers also have larger margins on the bottom of the page than on the top which can cause major shifts for two-sided printing.

Even on a relatively high-end printer with auto-duplex you might get better results by manually flipping the sheets.

[Stephanie5C67]

Tried this method too. Everyone who commented was right. In the end, the issue is margins within the inkjet printer. I wound up printing the front and back of the card separately and the match-up just fine. 

Does anyone have any good printers they'd recommend for a very small business?

[Peter Spier]

I'm quite fond of my Xerox Phaser 7800 (which cost around $6000 when it was new, as I recall), but even it can be off up to an eighth of an inch. I do find that matchup is always better printing one side, then flipping the stack and printing the other (faster, too), and I usually print from Acrobat rather than ID.

I always advise designing with a misalignment in mind, just as you would for bleed.

[Geоrge]

Some offtop: with all respect to InDesign, it has never been a program for print. My strong IMHO here: Do pdf-export and print from Acrobat Pro. 

[Luke Jennings3]

Some printers have settings you can adjust to help align the front & back, you may need to drill down pretty far to find them. You could try to measure the offset and adjust the position of the of the back* and try again until the alignment is acceptable, although the position may change with paper thickness, or even sheet to sheet.

*Make a new blank InDesign file the size of your PDF, including the crop marks, place the original PDF into it and move it slightly in the desired direction, export a new PDF (without bleed or crop marks).