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When I render a document with XeLaTeX on A4 paper and try to print it with the Mac PDF Preview app, scaling is automatically set to 96% to make the document fit the paper.

\documentclass[a4paper]{article}
\begin{document}
Hello world
\end{document}

When I open A4-sized PDFs created with other software and print them with PDF Preview, no scaling is applied (100%).

Neither of the two techniques in this answer help.

AndreKR
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2 Answers2

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Mac preview has the annoying habit to automatically scale down pages. To switch this off, enter

defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode 0

in terminal.

In case you understand German, more details can be found at https://blogs.fau.de/faumac/de-aktivieren-der-automatischen-druckskalierung-von-apples-vorschau-app/

samcarter_is_at_topanswers.xyz
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  • That doesn't help if you're producing documents for other people to view. My solution produces documents that aren't scaled on anybody's Mac. – AndreKR Aug 29 '17 at 10:56
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This prevents the Mac PDF Preview app from offering any scaling:

\usepackage[paperheight=842bp,paperwidth=595bp]{geometry}

I uncompressed the resulting PDFs with pdftk test.pdf output uc.pdf uncompress.

It turned out that \documentclass[a4paper]{article} leads to /MediaBox [0 0 595.28 841.89], which causes the Preview app to offer to scale down to 96% by default.

Next I tried \usepackage[paperheight=297mm,paperwidth=210mm]{geometry}, which leads to the exact same result.

Then I tried \usepackage[paperheight=296mm,paperwidth=209mm]{geometry}. This gives /MediaBox [0 0 592.44 839.06], but the Preview app still wants to scale down to 96%, even though the document is actually 1mm smaller than the A4 paper to be printed on!

I found only one format that leads to no scaling and that is /MediaBox [0 0 595 842], that is in LaTeX:

\usepackage[paperheight=842bp,paperwidth=595bp]{geometry}
AndreKR
  • 1,025