margins set outside printable area

I am using a HP LaserJet 2100M printer, and the driver says HP LaserJet Series 2100 PCL6. The problem does not occur in Excel, even when I set the margins small, e.g., at .5 all the way around. It is only in Word. I tried renaming Normal.dot to Normal1.dot, and letting Word create a new one. That has worked in the past, but it works for awhile and then messes up again.

I have this problem also.  There are particular files we have in landscape format.  4 of us are networked to one HP4000N and we're on windows XP w/ word 2000.  If there are 4 documents, all formatted the same, we can each usually print 1 correctly, but when we try to print another copy or another document formatted the same, then the left 3+ inches of the page are left blank, usually cutting off in the middle of a charcter.  The files even show up like this in print-preview, but only after they have printed correctly once.
The text area view shows that everything is within the printable area.

I have experienced similar margin problems with Word 2000 at home.

Maybe I'll downgrade to Office 2000.  It worked a little better.

A user asked me about the same problem today.  I tried it on my machine and saw the same thing.  I discovered that we were both using the PCL driver for the HP Laserjet printer.  Once I changed the driver being used for the printer to the PS version, the problem went away.

By changing fromt the PCL6 to the PCL5 driver, I was able to fix this same problem.

No comment has been added lately, so it's time to clean up this TA.
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Daleoran
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Hi,

I had a very similar problem.  We have 2 HP LaserJet 5000N printers hooked up via JetDirect to a switch.  25 computers in our office access these printers via the domain controller.  One day out of the blue, this Word margin problem occurred--for everyone in the company, at the same time.

I spoke to HP about this and they said they were working with Microsoft to fix the drivers and that it was a known driver communication problem between the HP drivers and Microsoft Word (by the way, this has also happened with WordPerfect in our office).  This probably means that Microsoft released a patch that broke printing, because the only changes that were made to these systems was applying critical updates.

Anyway, I found beta drivers from HP that correct the problem.  Even though the 5000's don't have drivers specifically, I was able to use the PCL5e drivers for the LaserJet 8000 without a problem.  (We don't use PCL6 drivers anymore here because of unrelated problems with PCL errors).  Once the drivers were installed, the problem went away.  Now I can set the bottom margin to as little as 0.17"

http://www.hp.com/pond/ljbeta/index.html#2000

The drivers are build 4.3.2.230.  You might want to check the standard drivers section of HP.com to make sure that they haven't released a final driver > 4.3.2.230.  

Good luck,

Scott Holodak

Thanks to sholodak's comment from 02/27/2004.

You were right on the money with  theHP LaserJet 5000N fix.  Our customers eyes lit up as I read her the description.  Your Laserjet 8000 Beta Driver turns the key because it supports the same tray numbering scheme as the 5000N.

Thank You!!

I have experienced this problem for so long, but I am the only person here (of 6 users, but only 1 of 2 using XP) who experiences it, therefore the IT manager will not replace the driver for our HP LaserJet 2100 (currently using the PCL6 driver). I am unable to do anything in File...Page Setup without provoking this error. Replacing normal.dot is not a solution. Copying/pasting into a new document does not work because these are large documents based on multi-section templates.

My most successful workaround is to save and close the doc, exit Word, reopen Word, and then reopen the doc. Then, as long as I do not do Print Preview or Page Setup, I am usually ok. Except for today, where I had to repeat this process three times before I could print normally.

Another solution, but it's extremely unsatisfactory, is to save as RTF, open the rtf in Word 2000, save again as doc, restore all the formatting (since it's lost by conversion to RTF), and then return to the XP machine.

Among other things, My document templates are now being used by others, and one other person (also using XP) is now having the problem. Therefore, my abilities with Word appear suspect. I have not found a report of anyone else having this type of problem. Any suggestions?  Thank you.

I have been having exactly the same problem as CAsmussen.  The only workaround I have found is exiting Word and reopening the document.

And the fix should be to go into "tools/options/print" and uncheck the "allow A4/Letter paper resizing" option.

I switched from the PCL6 driver to the PCL5e, and I haven't had this problem since.

I have had the same problem from time-to-time (it just happened to me now) for years and it seems related to particular documents. most often ones I've received from people using older versions of word.  When I"ve seen this happen it is frequently the case that closeing the document brings up a dialog box asking to change the normal.dot template.  If I say yes, then the problem seems to spread.  I've never found a satisfactory answer.  This thread is great and gives some new ideas to try.  BTW I'm using Office 2003 installed clean within the last two weeks on XP.