[Scribus] Margins and printing on laserjet

[Susan J Hogarth]

I have another question and I'm not sure how basic it is. I'm trying to create 
and print a 8.5x11 in page (portrait) on an HP laserjet, and to get the 
margins correct (ie, about equal at top and bottom), I have to make the 
bottom margin HUGE (100pt) and the top one TEENY (9pt) - this is for both 
printing directly from Scribus as well as exported PDFs. However, I only want 
to use the laserjet to proof the pages before sendign them to a printer.

Now, when I started with Scribus a few months ago I noticed the default 
margins are much larger for the bottom of the page, which I thought was odd 
but being quite ignorant of DTP decided to go with. I was sending my PDFs off 
to a printer and (bad me) not printing out proofs (this is for a newsletter). 
I am guessing the printer just centered the PDFs I sent him and printed 
without saying anything about how poor the placement was. But I've switched 
printers, and this guy simply (I think) prints them from a laser printer (by 
this time I've combined the letter-sized docs into a 11x17 doc).

The last issue, the guy doing the printing (the new printer) noticed the 
offset and - instead of asking me to correct the PDFs or re-positioning them 
on the page - simply printed them out with the wrong margins and then chopped 
off the bottom of the page *physically*.

Now I am trying to get an absolutely correct template for my newsletter and 
I'm wondering if I will need different margins for my printer and for the 
docs I eventually send to the 'real' printer? I saw something like this in a 
search through the archives, but nothing I could really use to help me. Am I 
going to have to just nudge stuff around to get the margins correct? I'm also 
having an issue that I set the right and left margins idential and they are 
different :-( Is there a good primer on DTP in general which deals with these 
issues?

-- 
Susan Hogarth