Margins to Printable Area Calculator
Work out the printable area of a sheet from its size and all four margins.
What is Printable Area?
The printable area is the paper less its margins, and it is worth calculating for two reasons. The first is line length: a text block much wider than about 90 characters is hard to read because the eye loses its place on the return sweep, which is why a 1-inch margin on Letter is a reading decision as much as a formatting one. The second is paper: margins that leave 60% of the sheet printable mean you are paying for 40% of a page on every copy, and a print shop's 15 mm grip on all sides costs another few percent.
How it works
Each of the four margins is converted to millimetres and subtracted from the sheet, and the result is reported as dimensions, as a share of the total sheet area, and as the area lost to margins. Keeping the four margins separate matters for bound documents, where the left margin is 1.25 inches so the binding does not eat the text, and for the standard presets — Normal, Narrow, the MLA and APA one-inch convention, and the print-shop safe margin — which are tabulated against the chosen sheet. Margins that do not fit collapse the box to nothing and are reported as an error rather than rendered as a negative area.
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Examples
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