Borderless printing (full-bleed printing) is a printing technique that applies ink to the entirety of the paper’s surface. It leaves no unprinted margins or slug area. Borderless printing is especially useful for printing photos, or parts of a larger mosaic like a billboard or banner.
Most printer drivers will slightly increase the size of the image to help create a true borderless print. However, if you’re working with something like a template that requires an exact size this may cut of the edges of the template. To help compensate for this issue, most printer drivers allow you to adjust the “expansion” or “extension” amount within the printer settings. Increasing or decreasing the value can help fix borderless printing size issues on a commercial printer you may have an option for “Auto expand” or “Retain size” that can correct this issue.
Another common setting that causes cut off is if the image is smaller than the paper, and the program you’re printing from has an “Auto fit” or “Fit to page” option. Because the program will increase the size of the image to fit the page and the printer driver increases the image for borderless printing, you will encounter cut of edges. To prevent this problem disable or uncheck any auto fit option.
Finally, when printing from a program that has margins, make sure to set all margins to 0 (zero) before printing.
Edge-to-edge printing is a print style that leaves a slim border around the surface of your printed photo. The border isn’t printed; rather it’s a small area of the card to which no print was applied.
Over-the-edge printing is a print method that leaves no visible border around the edges of your printed photo. This print method is available on reverse-transfer printers, also known as retransfer printers.