A public service announcement about smartPATTERNs for North Americans

I guess I could have paid to have a print shop print my custom-sized Barrel Leg Jeans pattern in AO format, in which case it would be perfect. I chose to print it at home on my very old Brother B&W laser printer, because it's instant gratification. 

You know the drill - scale the PDF to 100% (i.e. don't scale), print one-sided, cut off one or two of the borders of each page, tape the pages together, cut out your actual pattern pieces, and off you go.

smartPATTERN is based in Germany, so they prepare their pattern for A4 paper, which is in short (non-existent) supply in North America. A4 paper is thinner and longer than letter sized paper, which is what my printer can handle. It's close, but not close enough.

As usual, smartPATTERN instructions say to "cut off the bottom and right edges of the sheets that have a following page downwards and/or to the right." DO NOT do this. 

On the screen of your computer, you can see there is a guide line for cutting at the lower edge of the page.

However, this line does not show up on your printed letter sized page. There is no guidance as to where to cut your pages to make matching them vertically easy. 

Why?

The guide line falls outside the printable area of your page. Printer technology requires a plain border of about 5 mm (ISO standard) on all four sides of your printed page. If your image's lines go closer to the paper edge than that, too bad. They won't show up. 

A4 paper is 0.7" (17.6 mm) longer than letter sized paper. So a PDF designed for A4 paper allowing for standard printable area borders of 5 mm is very likely to have lines that extend outside the printable area of your letter sized page at the top or the bottom of your page, or both. 

There is a guide line for cutting at the top edge of the printed smartPATTERN pages. It's about 13 mm from the edge of the paper. When I look at the PDF on my screen, it appears that the bottom border would be about the same width. 

Based on my eye-balling of a page where there are multiple lines crossing the vertical border between sheets, the bottom guide line on these pages would fall approximately 4 mm below the bottom edge of your letter sized pages. 

I stupidly cut off the top of page B1. Oops. There is a 4 mm gap between the pages. 

You can go ahead and cut off the side edge (A4 paper is skinny so the side borders are wider than necessary) but DO NOT cut off the bottom (or top) of your page. Instead, align the top guide line 4 mm BELOW the bottom edge of the page above it. 

Aside from that little SNAFU, the pattern assembly process is going well. The printed lines are lovely and they match up perfectly. 

Thanks for all the nice comments! It makes me happy to blog again when I know people are reading.