Your export looks right on screen, but on paper the content is sliced off near one or more sheet edges — most often the bottom. It usually affects some sheets and not others, which is what makes it confusing: the tiles whose content runs right up to the sheet edge are the ones that lose it.
There are two places this comes from — the margin you set in Docuslice, and what the print dialog does to the page afterwards. Work through both.
Cause 1 — the margin is inside the printer's unprintable border
Consumer inkjet and laser printers cannot print all the way to the physical paper edge. They reserve an unprintable border of roughly 0.25 in on every side, and typically more at the bottom edge where the paper feed grips the sheet. Anything falling inside that border is dropped by the printer, not by Docuslice.
So if your poster margin is 0, every sheet has content sitting in a band the printer will not render. A margin of 0.25 in is no better in practice: it is merely equal to the unprintable border rather than clear of it, and the real border varies by model and is larger at the bottom.
The fix — raise the margin
Docuslice offers five margins: 0.00, 0.25, 0.50, 0.75 and 1.00 inch.
- Move to 0.50 in. That clears the unprintable border on essentially every consumer printer.
- If the bottom edge is still losing content, go to 0.75 in. Bottom borders are the widest.
The trade-off, stated plainly
A bigger margin means less printable area per sheet, which means the same poster needs more sheets. Going from 0.25 in to 0.50 in on a large poster can add a whole row or column. That is a real cost, not a free fix — but a sheet you have to reprint costs more.
If you want the arithmetic behind why the count changes, it is in Grid Mode and Size Mode.
Cause 2 — the print dialog is changing your page
Docuslice sizes every exported page to the paper you picked. Choose A4 and each page in the PDF is exactly A4; choose Letter and each page is exactly Letter. Anything the print dialog then does to that page is a change to a page that was already correct.
Four settings are worth checking, in this order.
The paper size does not match
If the dialog is set to a different size from the one you exported, those two sizes have to be reconciled, and the driver reconciles them by scaling. A4 artwork sent to a printer set to Letter comes out wrong — and nothing in the dialog announces it. This is the quiet one, because you never asked for scaling and were never told it happened.
Set the print dialog's paper size to the same size you chose in Docuslice, and do it before you touch the scale. Choosing 100% while the two sizes still disagree leaves the driver reconciling them anyway.
Check the printer's own paper setting too, in its driver or on its front panel. Some drivers take the tray setting over whatever the dialog says.
The dialog is set to fill the page
Fill page, Fill entire paper, Fill available area — whatever your dialog calls it — scales the page up until it covers the sheet, and whatever overflows the edges is cut off. That is a real crop, and it is the print setting most likely to be behind one.
Set the scale to 100% or Actual Size instead.
Borderless printing is switched off
This one applies only if your printer supports borderless. If it does and borderless is not enabled, the printer falls back to its normal unprintable border and clips whatever sits inside it — the same mechanism as Cause 1, arriving from the printer rather than from your margin.
If you set a 0 margin expecting edge-to-edge output, borderless has to be enabled for that to work. Otherwise raise the margin instead.
Fit to page — worth ruling out, but not a crop
Fit to page and Shrink to fit scale the page down until the whole of it fits inside the printable area. Nothing is cut off: the entire page is still there, just smaller.
So if content is genuinely missing, fit-to-page is not your culprit and you can stop chasing it. What it does cause is a poster that comes out smaller than the size you asked for, with tiles that do not line up when you assemble them. Still worth setting to 100% — just for a different reason.
Which one is it?
Measure a printed sheet against the paper size you chose.
- Content missing at the edges, sheet otherwise the right size — the margin (Cause 1), a fill setting, or borderless being off.
- Whole image present but smaller than it should be — a scale or paper size mismatch. Nothing was cropped; everything was shrunk.
- Only the sheets whose content reaches the sheet edge are affected, the rest are fine — the margin. A print setting would affect every sheet equally.
One thing to know before you set the margin to zero
Overlap — the feature that removes white lines at the seams — is measured as a fraction of the margin. A margin of 0 means no overlap, whatever percentage you pick. If you are cutting the margin down to fit fewer sheets, you are also silently giving up overlap.
See How to Get Rid of White Gaps When Taping Tiled Prints Together.