Printing a Full Page from Paint

See also Making Fancy Headings in Paint.

Full Page Border Template     Making the Flower Border     About Text in Paint     Printing on the Same Page Twice

Sometimes you may want to make a whole page in Paint. For instance, Mary, a reader, wanted to make a cover page for a report.

You could, of course, make the parts of the page and assemble them in a word processor or a desktop publishing program, but sometimes it's more convenient to do the whole thing in Paint.

This is particularly handy if your word processor offers borders but often fails to print the bottom part.

It's tricky in Paint, but it can be done. You'll probably faint when you see the size of the file, though. If you go with Paint's default format of 24 bit bmp, it could be as much as three megabytes! Unless you plan to put a photograph on the page, go for 256 colours.

Setting up the Page

Here's one way to make Paint print a full page.

Go into Image > Attributes and set the image size to the size of your paper. So if you're using A4, set it to 210 x 297mm or 8.27 x 11.69 inches. If you're using American letter, set it to 8.5 x 11 inches.

Paint will adjust the measurements you put in, but only a little bit. I don't know how to stop that from happening.

Then go into File > Page Setup and set the narrowest margins your printer allows.

You'll need to reset these margins each time you open the document, because Paint will reset them to the defaults. It's probably simpler to give in gracefully and accept Paint's margins. They're not so different as to make too much difference.

Then run some trials.

Draw rectangles on the page as I've done. (I know that your border won't be in two parts, but because Paint doesn't have autoscroll I did the easiest thing. Don't do your real border at this stage because you could waste a lot of ink.)

Now go to print preview and see if all the rectangles are showing on one page. (You might need to zoom in twice. Paint has a pretty bad print preview.) The differently coloured lines will give you an idea of just where the printable area starts and finishes.

If all the lines are showing on the one page, you can go back to the drawing window and try moving them outwards a bit to find the maximum print area.

There will probably be a “next page” button on the print preview toolbar; the drawing may be too wide or too long, bit it's quite possible that the whole diagram will be on the one page but that Paint will still insist on showing several more—totally blank—pages.

Go back to the drawing window and adjust the drawing if necessary . So long as the whole diagram is on the one page things should work out properly.

Hit File > Print. When your print dialogue appears, change the options from All to Pages from 1 to 1.

This should stop a lot of blank pages rolling out of the printer.

If the print-out is OK, make your real border to the same dimensions—make it inside the widest printable area—and it should be right.

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Full Page Templates

Alternatively, you could open Paint and paste in one of the bordered pages linked below. Be sure to choose one appropriate for your own paper size.

These are two borders for each of two paper sizes. When you click the link you'll see that the border is hard against the left side of the “paper”. It'll look the same when you paste it into Paint, too, but if you go to Print Preview you should find that it has centred itself.

Also, in some browsers, the coloured lines won't show properly. In fact they look like this:

If you Right click one of these links you can choose to open the “picture” in a new window. Then Right click on the picture and choose Save Picture As. Please close the new window when you return here.

To save time, you could just right click and choose Save Target As. The plain black borders are 7KB, the coloured ones about 10KB.

About Using the Templates

The Colour Block

These templates are gif images. To use one, open it in Paint and save it under a new name.

You will see that there's a little block of colours on the page. That's because most programs won't allow you to use more colours in a gif image than were there when it was saved. Select the colour block and move it out of your way, but don't delete it until you have all the colours that you want in your own border picture.

If you want to use more colours than the ones I've included, you'll need to save the template as a full colour bmp. If you're going to paste in a photograph, you'll need to do that.

Changing Things

Make sure that everything you put onto the page is on or inside the lines I've drawn. To be certain, either leave them there until you've finished, or put some markers of your own in the same positions.

You could flood my lines with different colours, flood the space between them, or paint over them with thicker lines. You could also take a small graphic and paste it repeatedly until you've made a whole new border, as I did with the flower in the illustration at the top of the page.

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Making the Flower Border

Before I began with the flowers, I put one dot of colour at each corner of the black page frame. This keeps the finished page centred and hardly shows on the printed work.

To make the border, I first made five copies of the same flower, then used the flood tool to give each one a different colour. I drew a plain vertical line inside the right-hand black page border and pasted a copy of each flower onto the line, one below the other. I made sure that they didn't quite touch the page border, because I knew I'd want to flood it away later. I selected the vertical line of five flowers and, holding Ctrl, dragged a copy to a position exactly underneath, making sure that I kept the line quite straight. I repeated this until the line was long enough, then Ctrl dragged one copy to the left of the page.

I dragged another copy of the whole line and used Image > Flip/Rotate > Rotate by Angle > 90° to get a horizontal line of flowers. I cut off the flowers that made the line too long to fit across the bottom of the frame, then put the horizontal line into position just above the bottom black margin. I took a copy of that line up to the top of the frame and put it just below the top black margin.

When I had all sides of the flower frame made, I gathered the original five flowers into a little bunch, which I pasted at each corner.

Once the flower frame was complete, I used the flood tool loaded with white to remove the original plain black page border, but NOT the four corner dots.

You can, of course, substitute any small graphic for the flower that I used in the example.

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About Text in Paint

Ordinary text does not print as nicely from Paint as it does from your word processor. This applies whether you paste text from another document or write it freshly in Paint.

For this reason, I'd be inclined, if I had a fair bit of normal sized text, to print just the borders, headings and decorations in Paint, then run the printed page through a second time in your regular word processor.

 

Twice Through the Printer

Running a page through the printer twice is easy. The only trouble you'll have is making sure that you know how the paper feeds into the printer. Some printers print on what you'd think of as the back or bottom side of the paper, some print on the top side or the side facing you. Also, which end of the paper is treated as the top can vary.

Waste a bit of paper to save yourself later frustration. I actually write on a sheet with grey-lead pencil: “leading edge”, “this side was facing down”, “left”, “right” and so on, before I put it through a new printer. Maybe particles of the pencil could damage the printer, but I haven't noticed any ill effects.

OK. The rest is plain sailing.

1. Print the decorated page—with borders and fancy headings—from Paint.
2. Measure the distance from each edge of the page to a little way inside the printed part
3. In Page Setup in your word processor, use these measurements for margins.
4. Type your text on the word processor page.
5. For starters, print that page onto a new blank sheet.
6. Hold the two pages together and look through them at the light to make sure that everything is in the right place.
7. If you need to adjust the word processor margins, do so.
8. Now put the decorated page into the printer and print the word processor page on it.

After you've done it a few times, you won't need to bother with steps 5 to 7.