Schematic Not Centered in Printed Document

[Rob Riggs]

When printing a schematic to a US Letter page in EEschema, EEschema's print preview shows the schematic properly centered on the page. However, when previewing in the print dialog and when printing, the schematic is offset by about 1cm to the right, leaving a large margin on the left and and a small margin on the right. When printed, part of the border is cut off on the right because the margin is too small.

I have attached a PDF that shows the problem.

The only work-around I have found is to make the schematic A4 and have the print driver scale it to fit on a US Letter page. Asking EEschema to print an A4 diagram to US Letter (by selecting US Letter as the paper size in Page Setup) results in the same problem.

To reproduce:
Create a new project in Kicad.
Open the schematic in EEschema.
Change the page size to US Letter.
Print the page to a PDF.
View the PDF.
Note that the diagram is not centered and that both the schematic info box and the PDF info shows that it is US Letter size.

Or

Create a new project in Kicad.
Open the schematic in EESchema.
Verify the page size is A4.
In the print dialog select "Page Setup..."
Set the paper size to "US Letter"
Print the page to a PDF.
View the PDF.
Note that the diagram is not centered and that PDF info shows that it is US Letter size.

Application: Eeschema
Version: 6.0.0-unknown-r16130-945eaceb, debug build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.61.1 OpenSSL/1.1.1b zlib/1.2.11 brotli/1.0.5 libidn2/2.2.0 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) libssh/0.8.7/openssl/zlib nghttp2/1.34.0
Platform: Linux 5.0.17-200.fc29.x86_64 x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
    Boost: 1.66.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.61.1
    Compiler: GCC 8.3.1 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

Verified on 5.1.2-dev and master (below)

Low enough that we can probably push to 5.1.4 as soon as we have a tag for it.

Application: Eeschema
Version: (5.1.0-1008-g945eaceb9-dirty), debug build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.64.0 OpenSSL/1.1.1c zlib/1.2.11 libidn2/2.0.5 libpsl/0.20.2 (+libidn2/2.0.5) libssh2/1.8.0 nghttp2/1.36.0 librtmp/2.3
Platform: Linux 4.19.0-5-amd64 x86_64, 64 bit, Little endian, wxGTK
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,wx containers,compatible with 2.8) GTK+ 3.24
    Boost: 1.67.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.64.0
    Compiler: GCC 8.3.0 with C++ ABI 1013

Build settings:
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Seth Hillbrand (sethh)]

I do not observe this on MacOS. Might be Linux-specific, in which case we may be limited in what we can address.

Either way, we should hold off on a master-branch fix until we port the printing to Cairo.

Application: Eeschema
Version: (5.1.0-727-g66a43612b), debug build
Libraries:
    wxWidgets 3.0.4
    libcurl/7.54.0 LibreSSL/2.6.4 zlib/1.2.11 nghttp2/1.24.1
Platform: Mac OS X (Darwin 18.2.0 x86_64), 64 bit, Little endian, wxMac
Build Info:
    wxWidgets: 3.0.4 (wchar_t,STL containers,compatible with 2.8)
    Boost: 1.69.0
    OpenCASCADE Community Edition: 6.9.1
    Curl: 7.54.0
    Compiler: Clang 9.0.0 with C++ ABI 1002

Build settings:
    USE_WX_GRAPHICS_CONTEXT=ON
    USE_WX_OVERLAY=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_MODULES=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_PYTHON3=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON=ON
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_WXPYTHON_PHOENIX=OFF
    KICAD_SCRIPTING_ACTION_MENU=ON
    BUILD_GITHUB_PLUGIN=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCE=ON
    KICAD_USE_OCC=OFF
    KICAD_SPICE=ON

[Dick Streefland (dick-streefland)]

I'm also seeing this with kicad-5.1.4 running on Ubuntu, with A4 paper size.
A workaround is to print to a file and then recreate the margins with the pdfcrop utility from the texlive-extra-utils package.

[tistructor (tistructor)]

I have the same problem with kicad 5.1.5 Linux mint 19.3.
I also had another problem: you cannot selectively print pages, normally only print one or not print.

I solve using the plot and saving in pdf in this way the patterns on the pages are centered.

[Maciej Suminski (orsonmmz)]

KiCad has migrated to Gitlab, this issue is available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1907

[KiCad Janitor (kicad-janitor)]

KiCad bug tracker has moved to Gitlab. This report is now available here: https://gitlab.com/kicad/code/kicad/-/issues/1907