How to print a calendar so nothing gets cut off

Almost every printing problem with a calendar comes from one of four settings: the paper size, the scale, the margins, and whether your browser is adding a header and footer of its own. Get those four right once and every calendar you print afterwards comes out the size you expected. This page walks through each of them, then explains the one thing about calendar grids that surprises people — why some months are visibly more cramped than others.

1. Pick Letter or A4 — and know where your browser lets you

US Letter is 8.5 × 11 inches (215.9 × 279.4 mm). A4 is 210 × 297 mm. They are close enough to look interchangeable and different enough to ruin a print: A4 is about 6 mm narrower and about 18 mm taller. Send a Letter-sized page to a tray full of A4 and your printer does one of two things — clips roughly 6 mm off one edge, or scales the whole sheet down to about 97% and leaves a deep white band along the bottom. Neither is what the preview showed you.

This matters more than it sounds because defaults disagree by continent. Printers and PDF viewers sold in the United States default to Letter; almost everywhere else defaults to A4. On the calendar maker the paper size is a button, and the preview is locked to the real aspect ratio of the sheet you picked.

Where that choice actually takes effect depends on your browser, and this is the point most printing advice gets wrong. A web page can ask for a paper size with a CSS rule called @page. Chrome and Edge honour the request, so choosing A4 here opens their print dialog on A4. Firefox and Safari ignore it outright. Firefox’s print settings carry a flag for exactly this — mUsePageRuleSizeAsPaperSize, hard-coded to false — so a page’s requested size never reaches the paper selection at all, and Safari behaves the same way. On those two browsers you must pick the paper size yourself, in the print dialog.

The reliable habit, then, is: choose the size here and confirm it in the dialog. Or side-step the question entirely by downloading the PDF. A PDF carries its page size inside the file, so every browser, every viewer and every print shop gets the same geometry without being asked.

2. Leave the scale at 100%

The print dialog’s scale control is often set to Fit to page (or “Shrink to fit”). That sounds protective, and it is the single most common reason a printed calendar comes out smaller than expected. Fit-to-page shrinks your page until it clears the printer’s unprintable border on all four sides — typically down to about 94–96% — and that shrink applies to everything: the grid, the day numbers, the notes lines.

Firefox deserves a specific warning here: shrink-to-fit is its default, not an option you have to switch on. Its print settings ship with mShrinkToFit true, which the dialog shows as “Fit to page width”. So a Firefox print is scaled unless you change it.

Set scale to 100% (some dialogs call it “Actual size”). The calendars here are laid out with a margin wide enough for most consumer printers, so at 100% nothing reaches the edge that a printer cannot reach. If you do see clipping at 100%, the cause is almost always the paper size from step 1, not the scale.

3. Margins, the edge your printer cannot touch, and what “Default” really does

Very few home printers print to the edge of the paper. The figure the web repeats is 3–5 mm all round, and it is true of three edges out of four. The edge that decides whether a calendar’s bottom row survives is much worse: HP DeskJet-class inkjets cannot print within 11.7 mm (0.46 in) of the bottom edge, on Letter and A4 alike, because the sheet is still gripped by the feed rollers as its last centimetre passes the head. A Brother-class laser is an even 4.23 mm on all four sides. A Canon inkjet on Letter is 6.35 mm at the sides, 3 mm at the top and 5 mm at the bottom. Anything inside that band simply does not come out, and nothing on a web page can detect which printer you own — there is no browser API that reports the unprintable margin.

That spread is why this site defaults to a 0.5 in (12.7 mm) margin, which clears the worst measured case by a single millimetre, and why its 0.25 in option is labelled as risky rather than offered as a free choice: 0.25 in is 6.35 mm, comfortably inside a DeskJet’s bottom border. You can stop guessing about your own machine in about a minute — the printer test page prints six labelled rectangles at 3, 5, 8, 10, 13 and 16 mm from the paper edge, and whichever is the innermost one that came out complete is your printer’s real limit.

Then there is the part that surprises people: the Margins menu in your print dialog decides whether the page’s own margin is used at all. In Chrome and Edge, a page’s @page margin is read only while Margins is set to Default; pick None, Minimum or Custom and the browser throws it away and uses its own. Default and Minimum then clamp the result up to your printer’s hardware minimum, so the page cannot be clipped — but it is also no longer exactly the sheet you previewed. None and Custom skip that clamp entirely and let the printer clip whatever falls outside its reach.

So leave Margins on Default for a calendar and let the margin chosen here come through. Set it to None in exactly one situation: on the test page, where being clipped is the measurement. And if you plan to punch holes or use a binder, print with a wider margin on purpose and lose a little grid width rather than a whole column.

4. Turn off your browser’s headers and footers

By default every major browser stamps the page title, the URL, the date and a page number onto anything you print, and it takes that space out of your page. On a calendar this shows up as a web address across the bottom of the sheet and a grid that has been squeezed to make room for it. Any calendar site whose print button is just the browser’s own print dialog leaves this entirely to you — it has no way to switch the setting off on your behalf.

• Chrome — in the print dialog open More settings and untick Headers and footers.
• Edge — open More settings and set Headers and footers to Off.
• Safari — in the print dialog untick Print headers and footers (on macOS you may need Show Details first).
• Firefox — open More settings and untick Print headers and footers under Options. If a guide tells you to open a separate Page Setup window and set header dropdowns to --blank--, it is describing Firefox before version 81; that window no longer exists.

The setting is remembered per browser, so this is a one-time fix. Or skip it entirely: downloading the PDF and printing that never involves the browser’s page furniture at all, because the PDF is a document rather than a web page. The PDF is built in your browser, so no calendar you make is ever sent anywhere — see how this site works.

5. What each browser actually decides for you

Three of the four settings above are negotiated between the page and the browser, and the browsers do not agree. This is the short version, and it is why one set of instructions cannot cover all of them:

• Chrome and Edge accept a page’s requested paper size, default to 100% scale, and honour the page’s margin only while their Margins menu says Default.
• Firefox ignores the requested paper size, defaults to fit-to-page-width rather than 100%, and gives you its own Margins menu. Two of the four settings therefore have to be corrected by hand.
• Safari also ignores the requested paper size; paper and scale both come from the macOS print dialog rather than from the page.

In every one of those cases the PDF download behaves identically, because the geometry is inside the file rather than requested from the browser. If you print calendars often, that is the path worth learning.

6. One-sided, and why duplex usually is not what you want

Print calendars one-sided unless you are making a booklet. A wall or desk calendar only ever shows one face, and a duplex print puts next month on the back where you cannot see it. Double-sided is worth it in exactly two cases: a folded booklet for a whole year, and a weekly planner where you genuinely want two weeks per sheet. If you do print duplex, choose flip on long edge for portrait pages, or the second side comes out upside down.

7. Paper stock changes more than you would guess

Standard 20 lb / 75 gsm copy paper is fine in a folder and disappointing on a wall: it curls, and heavy grid lines ghost through from the other side. 24 lb / 90 gsm is the cheapest meaningful upgrade. 32 lb / 120 gsm feels like a bought planner and takes ink without feathering. 65 lb / 176 gsm cardstock is stiff enough to stand in a frame. Check your printer’s manual before loading anything above roughly 120 gsm, and feed heavy stock from the rear or manual tray if you have one. If ink cost is the concern, the ink-light layout drops the fills and heavy borders and prints the same dates with a fraction of the coverage.

8. Why some months need six rows instead of five

A month grid has seven columns. A 31-day month therefore needs at least five rows — but which row the 1st lands in depends on what weekday it falls on, and once the first day sits late enough in the week, the last day spills past the 35th cell and the grid needs a sixth row. With Sunday-start weeks, a 31-day month beginning on a Friday or Saturday needs six rows; with Monday-start weeks the same month can need only five, because shifting the week start moves the 1st into a different column. The opposite extreme exists too: a 28-day February that begins exactly on the first day of your chosen week fits in four rows and nothing else.

This is not cosmetic. The sheet height is fixed, so the rows share whatever vertical space is left after the month heading and the weekday labels. Going from five rows to six makes every row about a sixth shorter — roughly 1.7 inches down to about 1.4 inches on portrait Letter — and that is the difference between three comfortable lines of handwriting per day and two. It is also why a calendar that fit last month can overflow this month with no setting changed. Every month page on this site states its row count outright, so you know before you print. If you need the extra height, landscape orientation gives a six-row month more room per cell than portrait does.

Print settings, in order

1. Choose Letter or A4 in the calendar, and load that paper.
2. In Firefox or Safari, choose it again in the print dialog — those two never receive the page’s request.
3. Set scale to 100% / Actual size.
4. Set margins to Default, never None.
5. Untick headers and footers.
6. Choose one-sided unless you are folding a booklet.
7. Print one test page before printing twelve — and if you have never measured this printer, make it the margin test sheet.

Where to go next

Ready to make one? Start at the calendar maker, or jump straight to the 2027 calendar, January 2027, or the whole of 2027 on one page. For a grid you fill in yourself, use the undated blank calendar; to see which days are marked and how observed-day rules work, see the calendar with US holidays.