How to print a flyer at home

To print a flyer at home, export it as a PDF at its real page size, open it and set the print dialog to the same paper size, choose the paper type that matches what is in the tray, set quality to high or best, and print one test copy before the batch. Keep text and important details away from the edges, because home printers leave an unprinted strip on plain paper. For a small run of noticeboard or street flyers that is all it takes; for a few hundred copies, compare the cost with a print shop first.

The table under this article lists every setting worth checking, with the value to choose and why.

Start from the right file

Print from a PDF, not a screenshot or an image dropped into a word processor. A PDF carries the page size, so the printer knows the flyer is A4 and does not have to guess how to scale it.

Check the image resolution before you print. HP’s guidance for printing photos at home is to start with an image of 300 DPI or more at the size it will print, because printer settings cannot add detail that is not in the file. An A4 page at 300 DPI is 2480 by 3508 pixels, and anything much smaller will print soft.

The garage sale flyer is a good candidate for home printing: a fictional street sale where six households need a few dozen copies for letterboxes and noticeboards, not a few thousand. Its minimal poster design is mostly type with generous white space, which prints cleanly on any home printer and does not use much ink.

The print dialog: size, scale and paper type

Three settings do most of the work.

Paper size. Set it to A4 to match the flyer. A dialog left on Letter will shrink or crop an A4 design, and the error is easy to miss until the address line is cut off.

Scale. If the design has a white margin around it, print at actual size. If colour or a photograph runs to the edge, choose fit to printable area, which shrinks the page slightly so nothing is clipped by the printer’s margin, and accept a thin even white border.

Paper type. Set it to match what is loaded: plain, matte or glossy. HP’s advice is to match the media type exactly, because the setting controls how the printer lays down ink, and the wrong choice gives washed out or smeared results. Then change quality from normal to best or photo for anything with images.

Why home printers leave a margin, and what to do about it

Most home printers cannot print right to the edge of a plain sheet. Borderless printing exists, but it is restricted. Epson’s guide for one of its printers lists the photo and heavyweight matte papers that support it, notes the feature is not available for all papers and settings, and explains that borderless printing enlarges the image slightly beyond the paper so part of it is cropped off.

That has two consequences for design. First, keep text, prices, dates and phone numbers well inside the edges, at least as far in as a print shop would ask for its safe area. Second, if a design has a background colour to the edge, either print it borderless on paper that supports it or print with fit to page and trim the white edge off with a guillotine or a steel ruler and knife.

The same logic applies to a shop, which trims from a larger sheet and asks for bleed. What bleed is explains why a margin protects the design either way.

Paper: weight and finish

Copy paper is 80 gsm. Paperlust’s guide to paper weight describes it as the office standard and too flimsy for anything a customer is meant to keep, and puts most commercial flyers between 115 and 170 gsm. A home printer will not always feed that range, so check the maximum weight in the printer’s specifications before loading a ream.

For most home printed flyers:

• 100 to 120 gsm plain or matte looks noticeably better than copy paper and suits text, price lists and simple designs.
• Matte photo or brochure paper suits designs with photographs, without glare on a noticeboard.
• Glossy photo paper makes photographs vivid but shows fingerprints, needs drying time and costs far more per sheet.

The cafe menu flyer shows where finish matters: its full menu is a table of dishes and prices that reads best on matte paper at a counter, while its photo specials board would suit a glossier stock in a window.

Run a test, then the batch

Print one copy on plain paper first, at the settings you plan to use. Hold it at the distance people will read it from and check three things: nothing is clipped at the edges, the smallest text is readable, and the colours are close enough to the screen. HP recommends exactly this, a small test on plain paper before committing expensive paper, because calibration between a screen and a printer is never perfect.

If colours are streaky or a band is missing, run the printer’s nozzle check or cleaning cycle before the batch rather than halfway through it. Then print the real run in small stacks, and on coated or glossy paper leave the sheets spread out to dry before you stack them, since fresh inkjet ink smudges easily.

Home or shop: the cost question

Home printing is convenient; it is not always cheaper. CHOICE compared the two and found that 500 colour pages over a year cost 143 dollars printed at home on one inkjet model, against 375 dollars at Officeworks, but that people who print only occasionally generally save by using a store, and that anything meant to look professional is worth sending to a print service.

Officeworks’ own printer guide gives the other half: laser printers are usually more economical for documents in volume, inkjets are the better choice for photographs on special paper, and a toner cartridge lasts far longer than an ink cartridge. A text and price flyer on a laser printer is cheap per page; a photo heavy flyer on an inkjet is not.

A simple rule: print at home for proofs and runs of up to a few dozen, and get a quote for anything larger. The sale flyer is the kind of design that justifies a shop, with a photograph leading its poster design and a run large enough for a letterbox drop.

Common mistakes

• Printing from the design tool’s preview instead of the exported file.
• Leaving the dialog on Letter for an A4 flyer.
• Fit to page on a design with margins, which shrinks it for no reason.
• Glossy paper with the plain paper setting, which floods the page with ink.
• Stacking inkjet prints before they dry.
• Text near the edge that the printer’s margin clips.

Build it

Export the flyer as a PDF: the PDF export includes every page, while PNG and JPG export only the page you are on. Export saves any unsaved changes first, so the file always matches the canvas, and asking for the same version again returns the file already rendered. An A4 page exports at 2480 by 3508 pixels, which is 300 DPI at A4.

The export has no bleed, no crop marks and no CMYK conversion; it is an RGB file at the exact page size, which is what a home printer expects. Its text is part of the page image, so it cannot be selected, which does not affect printing. The flyer to PDF page covers the export in detail, and the guide to creating a flyer for Instagram and print takes a flyer from brief to exported file. For what changes when the same flyer also runs on social media, see print flyer vs digital flyer.