Printing at 100 %

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

This note concerns Apple Preview.app. By default, Preview.app tries to fit the document to be printed into the selected paper size minus possible printer margins. This includes scaling and rotating.

If you wish a scaling of 100 % by default for printing, issue the command

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode 0

in Terminal.app. Turning off auto-rotating by default can be triggered by

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingAutoRotate 0

and you have to manually select the corresponding checkbox in case you wish to use the auto-rotate feature.

Returning to the factory default behavior is easiest by using the commands quoted above with “write” replaced by “delete”.