How to Print a Coloring Book at Home Without Clipping
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“How to print a coloring book at home” is really four separate problems: getting the size right, choosing paper that survives crayons, deciding whether to print one side or two, and holding the thing together. Get all four right and the book looks bought. Get one wrong and you get clipped edges, ink bleeding through the back, or a stack of loose sheets.
This is the technical version, with the settings that matter and the ones that do not.
US Letter or A4 — pick one and stop
The first decision is paper size, and it is decided by where you live, not by preference. US Letter is 8.5 by 11 inches; A4 is 210 by 297 millimetres. If your paper tray is filled with Letter, print Letter. If it is A4, print A4. Mixing the two is the number one cause of a book that prints with a white band down one side, because the printer scales one size to fit the other. The exact A4 dimensions are set out in the ISO 216 standard if you want the reference.
Scale 100%, not “fit to page”
This is the setting people miss. Your print dialog usually defaults to “Fit to page” or “Scale to fit,” which quietly shrinks or stretches the page to fill the paper. For a coloring book you want the opposite: set scale to 100 percent, or choose “Actual Size.”
Here is why it matters. A coloring page has margins built in so a home printer, which cannot print to the very edge of the sheet, does not clip the drawing. If the printer scales the page up to fill the paper, those margins shrink and the outer lines get cut off. At 100 percent, the margins stay where they were designed to be.
Paper weight for crayons, markers and pencils
| Medium | Paper weight | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Crayons | 24 lb / 90 gsm | Standard copier paper is fine |
| Colored pencils | 24-28 lb / 90-105 gsm | A little tooth helps the pencil grip |
| Markers | 32 lb / 120 gsm or heavier | Thin paper bleeds through to the back |
| Paint or water | Card stock, 65 lb / 176 gsm | Anything lighter buckles |
If you are printing for a mix of media and do not want to buy special paper, print single-sided. Then even a marker that bleeds through only marks a blank back, not another drawing.
Single-sided or double-sided
Double-sided saves paper and makes a thinner, more book-like object, and it is perfectly good for crayons and colored pencils. The catch is order: when you print two sides, page 2 lands on the back of page 1, so a child sees the next drawing through the paper if they hold it up. Numbered pages fix this, because even if the book is stapled out of order the numbers tell you where you are. Our books number every page for exactly this reason.
Single-sided is the safer choice for markers, for very young children who press hard, and for pages you might later frame or hang. It costs more paper and makes a fatter stack, which is why short activity books usually go double-sided and keepsake books go single.
Stapling, folding and binding
- Order the pages so the cover is on top and page one follows it.
- Tap the stack square on a table edge so the corners line up.
- Staple through the fold for a book of up to about twenty sheets. A long-arm stapler reaches the center; a normal stapler can do two staples along the left edge.
- Fold the cover over the stack and crease it, or leave it flat.
- For a longer book, punch three holes down the left edge and use a report cover or ribbon rather than fighting a stapler.
What to do when the printer clips the edges
If lines are still being cut off after you set the scale to 100 percent, work through these in order:
- Check the paper size in the dialog matches the tray. A4 file, Letter paper, or the reverse, will clip.
- Look for “borderless” or “fit” settings and turn them off. Borderless is for photos, not line art.
- Try a slightly different margin in the source PDF if your printer has unusually wide unprintable edges.
- Print a single test page before the whole book. It takes one sheet to find the problem.
Most home printers leave an unprintable border of a few millimetres on each side. That is normal and is why the page was designed with margins; a drawing that runs to the very edge of the sheet will always be clipped by a home printer.
A worked example
A home inkjet, US Letter paper, a book downloaded as a PDF. In the print dialog: Paper size Letter, Scale 100 percent, Layout single-sided for a marker-friendly book, and the “Fit to page” box unchecked. The first test copy printed with the cover centered and no clipped lines. For the crayon version the same file was printed double-sided on 24 lb paper, stapled twice through the fold with a long-arm stapler, and it sat flat on the table like a bought activity book.
The Keepsake Book — $24 once. Up to 40 of your own photos become a finished coloring book: a cover with the child’s name, a dedication page, numbered pages with captions, a reference page pairing each photo with its drawing, and a print-ready US Letter PDF. Your photos never leave your device. See what’s in it →
The PDF you get is already sized US Letter with margins set for a home printer and no bleed, so the settings above are the whole job. If you are printing a set for a classroom rather than one book, make coloring pages for my class covers the volume side. If you are assembling the pages from scratch rather than printing a finished file, how to make a coloring book from photos walks through the whole sequence, and custom coloring book for kids covers how to tune the pages for the age doing the coloring. If you are not sure your photos will convert cleanly in the first place, start with the free converter and see coloring pages from photos no sign up for how it runs in the browser. When you want a whole book rather than a stack of single pages, see the pricing.
Frequently asked questions
Why does my printer clip the edges of the page?
Almost always because the PDF is being scaled to fit the paper rather than printed at 100 percent. Set the scale to 100 or Actual Size, and check that the paper size matches the PDF. Home printers cannot print to the very edge, so any line inside the margin is the printer, not the file.
What paper weight is best for coloring?
Around 24 lb (90 gsm) copier paper is fine for crayons and colored pencils. For markers, which bleed through thin paper, use 32 lb (120 gsm) or a heavier card, or print single-sided so the bleed is on a blank back.
Should I print single-sided or double-sided?
Single-sided if you are using markers or if you want to frame pages. Double-sided saves paper and is fine for crayons and pencils, as long as the pages are numbered so the book stays in order.
How do I hold the book together without a binding machine?
Staple through the fold for a short book of up to about 20 sheets, or punch three holes and tie it with ribbon or a report cover. A long-arm stapler reaches the center fold; a normal stapler can staple the corner.