Your puzzle doesn’t fit because your printer shrank it
The pieces were correct when they left the browser. Something between the browser and the paper changed the scale, and it happens on almost every home inkjet the first time. Here is how to prove it in two minutes and stop it happening again.
You printed the sheet, cut along the lines, and the tabs are the wrong size. Piece four sits a millimetre off piece three, and by the last column the gap is wide enough to see the table through. Nothing about the puzzle is broken. The page is smaller than the file said it was, and every cut line came down with it.
Why the pieces stopped fitting
Take the default sheet: A4, 6 × 8, forty-eight pieces. The picture block is 190 × 253 mm and each cell is 31.7 mm square. That is measured, not estimated — it is what the generator hands the browser.
Now let a print driver run it at 94%, which is what “shrink to fit printable area” does when it decides your printer needs a bigger margin than the page declares:
| Measurement | At 100% | At 94% | Loss |
|---|---|---|---|
| Picture block width | 190.0 mm | 178.6 mm | −11.4 mm |
| One piece | 31.7 mm | 29.8 mm | −1.9 mm |
| Across 6 columns | 190.0 mm | 178.6 mm | 11.4 mm short |
| 100 mm calibration bar | 100.0 mm | 94.0 mm | −6.0 mm |
A4, 6 × 8 grid, portrait. Losses are absolute millimetres at 94%, which is the scale a shrink-to-fit driver typically lands on.
Eleven millimetres over six columns is a third of a piece. It is not a rounding error you can ignore while cutting — it is the reason a tab will not drop into its socket. And the error compounds: the right-hand column is eleven millimetres out of register with the left, so every piece in between is a little further from where it belongs.
The two-minute test
Every sheet this site produces carries a 100 mm bar in the footer strip, near the bottom edge, with a label at each end. The back sheet carries one too. It exists for exactly this reason: so you can stop guessing about your printer.
- Print one sheet. Any sheet. You do not need the photo you care about — the bar is geometry, not artwork.
- Find the bar. Look in the 18 mm strip at the foot of the page, below the crop marks. It is labelled 100 mm.
- Measure tick to tick with a ruler or steel rule. Not the printed line’s outer edge — the two end ticks.
- Divide by 100. A bar that measures 94 mm means your printer ran at 94%. A bar at 100 mm means it ran at 100% and the problem is somewhere else.
That single number is your printer’s real scale. Write it on the sheet if it is not 100 — you will want it the next time a print dialog pretends it has no scaling options.
The one setting that matters
The setting is called Scale 100%, and every browser hides it in a different corner of the dialog. Turn off anything with the word “fit” in it. That is the whole rule.
| Browser | Where it is | What to avoid |
|---|---|---|
| Chrome | Print → More settings → Scale | Fit to printable area, Fit to page |
| Edge | Print → More settings → Scale | Fit to printable area, Shrink to fit |
| Safari | Print → Show Details → Scale | Scale to fit, Scale to fit paper size |
| Firefox | Print → Scale (a percentage box) | Shrink to fit page width, Simplify page |
| Phone / tablet | Often no scale control at all | Print from a desktop browser instead |
Menu wording drifts between versions; the shape of it does not. If the dialog shows a number, it must read 100. If it shows a checkbox, it must be off.
Three other things that shrink a sheet
The scale setting is the usual suspect, but it is not the only one. If your bar measured 100 mm and the pieces still will not join, the cause is one of these.
1. The driver’s unprintable margin
Many cheap inkjets cannot place ink closer than 3–5 mm from the paper edge, and some are worse. When a driver cannot honour the page as declared, it does the one thing it can do quietly: it scales the content down to make it fit. This is the same 94% you get from fit-to-page, arriving through a different door. It is also why this generator keeps the puzzle inside a 10 mm margin — there is room for the driver to be honest.
2. Borderless expansion
“Borderless” or “borderless expansion” goes the other way: it enlarges the content past the page edge so no white sliver is left. On a puzzle sheet that is worse than shrinking, because it crops crop marks you need. Leave borderless off.
3. Print-to-PDF in the middle
If you save to PDF first and then print the PDF, you have introduced a second print dialog with its own scale control. The PDF is fine; the second dialog is not. A PDF made at 100% prints at 100%, and any viewer offering “Shrink to fit” will undo it.
Symptom to cause, in one table
| What you see | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Every piece slightly small, gaps grow left to right | Page scaled down (94–98%) | Scale 100%, fit-to-page off |
| Bottom or right column cut off | Driver margin larger than declared | Trim to crop marks, or use a larger sheet |
| No white border at all, edges clipped | Borderless expansion on | Turn borderless off |
| Pieces fit but paper curls and they will not lie flat | Paper too light (80 gsm) | Heavier card, 160–200 gsm |
| Tab is the wrong shape, not the wrong size | Tab size setting, not print scale | Set tab size in the generator, not the printer |
| Back sheet does not line up with the front | Duplex flipped the wrong edge | Flip on the short edge |
Print a test sheet now
One A4 page, any photo, forty-eight pieces. Measure the bar before you cut anything — after that every sheet you print is trustworthy.
You already cut it. Now what?
Two options, and the second one is usually the right call.
Reprint and recut. The photo is still in the tab — nothing was uploaded, so nothing is lost. Go back to the generator, print at 100%, and keep the old sheet as a size reference. Two A4 sheets of cardstock cost less than the time you will spend trying to force a bad set together.
Keep the cut pieces and use the numbered back. If you printed the back sheet, every piece has a number on the reverse, and the numbering survives being wrong by six percent: piece 23 is still piece 23, even if it is 1.9 mm small. Lay the pieces number-up and assemble by number, then flip. You are building the picture from the back, which is slower and more reliable than working from colour. How the numbered back works.