I posted this question about a year ago and didn’t get any responses. Let’s give it another try.
I have Adobe Reader 9 running on Windows XP.
I noticed that if I’m reading a PDF with the scale set at 100%, what I see on my screen is actually more like 120%. If I print, it prints exactly to scale, so the document itself is right.
Further, though, if I cut and past from Acrobat to any other application, the larger scale is preserved, and it prints at that larger scale, too. I have to set the scale in Acrobat to ~85%, then cut and paste to get the correct scale in the other application (eg, Microsft Paint).
Is there a way to avoid this pain-in-the-ass scaling issue? I don’t recall this being a problem in earlier versions of Adobe Reader.
You need to tell your PDF viewer the dot pitch of your monitor in order for it to be able to render a 100% zoom as actual size. Most modern PDF viewers will let you use either your operating system’s settings, or some custom settings you specify. I don’t know how to specify the dot pitch in Windows XP; probably it’s somewhere in the monitor or display settings in the Control Panel. But with Adobe Reader 9, you should be able to specify a custom dot pitch in the Preferences menu (Edit->Preferences->Resolution – at least, that’s where it is on my version, running on openSUSE). If you don’t know your monitor’s dot pitch, check the manual for the exact figure. You can get a rough calculation by using a ruler to measure the width of your display. Take the horizontal resolution of your monitor (in pixels) and divide by the physical width (in inches) to get the dot pitch (in dots per inch, or dpi).
Thanks!
It was set at 110, but a little trial and error showed in had to be 90.
Looks perfect now.