A printer margin test page that shows what your printer can really reach

Every printer holds a strip of blank paper around the edge that it physically cannot print on, and no website can find out how wide yours is. There is no browser API for it — the CSS working group has an open proposal and nothing more. So print this one sheet, look at which rectangles came out whole, and you will know your own printer’s safe margin to within a couple of millimetres. It takes one sheet of paper and about a minute, and afterwards every calendar you print here can be set to a margin you know will survive.

What is on the sheet

Six nested rectangles, drawn at 3, 5, 8, 10, 13, 16 millimetres from the edge of the paper and each labelled with its own distance. A cross and a circle in the middle, so you can see whether the image is centred. And a line exactly 100 mm long with a tick every 10 mm, which catches the other common failure: a print dialog silently scaling the page down to fit, so that everything on it is 4–6% smaller than it claims to be. Measure that line with a ruler. If it is short, your scale setting is not 100% and no margin advice will help until it is.

How to read the result

1. Print the sheet at 100% scale, with margins set to None or a custom 0, and headers and footers switched off. You are deliberately asking the printer to go as close to the edge as it can.
2. Find the innermost rectangle that came out complete on all four sides. Its label is roughly your printer’s unprintable border.
3. Look at the bottom edge separately. On most inkjets it is the worst one, because the sheet is still held by the feed rollers as the last centimetre goes past the head.
4. Pick that number, or the next size up, as your margin in the calendar maker.

What other people’s printers do

These are published figures for three families that bracket the consumer market. They are here so the numbers on this page can be checked, not so you can skip the test — the whole point is that your printer is not in this table.

Printer	Paper	Top	Bottom	Sides
HP DeskJet-class inkjet	Letter and A4	3 mm	11.7 mm	3.2 mm
Canon inkjet	Letter	3 mm	5 mm	6.35 mm
Brother laser	Letter and A4	4.23 mm	4.23 mm	4.23 mm

The figure the web repeats is “3–5 mm all round”. That is true of three edges and false of the fourth. The binding constraint is the bottom edge at 11.7 mm (0.46 in) on DeskJet-class inkjets, and it applies to Letter and A4 equally. That one number is why this site defaults to a 0.5 in (12.7 mm) margin, which clears the worst case by a single millimetre, and why the 0.25 in option is labelled as risky rather than presented as a free choice: 0.25 in is 6.35 mm, which is inside that border.

Why the sheet is portrait, and why that is enough

Printing something “landscape” rotates the image, not the paper: the sheet still enters the printer the same way round, so the wide unprintable strip stays on the same physical edge. One portrait test tells you what a landscape calendar will do as well. What does change things is the tray you feed from — a rear or manual tray often has a straighter paper path and a smaller border than the main cassette — so if you print heavy stock from a different tray, test that tray too.

Then what

Take the number you measured back to the generator and set the margin to match it, or wider. The rest of the printing settings that decide whether a calendar comes out the right size are covered in the printing guide — paper size, scale, and the browser headers and footers that quietly steal space from your page. If ink coverage is the thing you are trying to reduce rather than clipping, the ink-light layout drops the fills and heavy borders entirely. If you want the whole year to check against, there is 2027 on a single sheet, and for a grid you date yourself there is the undated blank calendar.