What is a printable and how does it work?

Frequently Asked Questions

Printables are “do it yourself of DIY” PDF file templates that are either downloaded or emailed to you for use. You may print them at home or at your local office supply store.

What type software do I need?

You will need a working desktop or laptop computer and the latest Adobe Reader® software to read and print your PDF files properly. You can download Adobe Reader®  for  free at www.adobe.com .

I have a Mac, can your printables work on my computer?

We make all of our printables on a Mac and they work on both PC and Mac OS platforms.  You just have to make sure that you are opening your files in Adobe Reader® and not Apple’s default PDF reader called Preview.  The Preview program will not work properly with our files.  If you  think your Mac is reading our files using Preview, do not double click on the files to open them.  Instead,  launch Adobe Reader® and open our files from the program itself.

I’ve never used printables. May I try some at no charge?

Yes! We will have bunches of free printables in our site’s freebies section but in the emantime you can choose from the free printables in our old blog.

Do I have to be a crafter to make these printables?

Nope. If you can fold a paper in half , you are halfway there.  We will teach you the rest.  We keep our printables easy to make and the most complicated of them have been timed at 10 minutes to make.

What types of papers should I use to print printables and what other supplies do I need ?

We have all of your paper questions answered right in this SUPPLIES tab on our site.

Any tips for printing printables at home?

Yup! We also have tips on how to print at home in our SUPPLIES page.

Any tips for printing printables at my local Office Supply shop?

It may be a good idea to print a test page first before placing your entire order at your office supply shop. Laser printers may print a bit saturated so you want to make sure to check the colors on a test printout. This is a great time to communicate to your printing shop if the colors look correct, need to be adjusted (lighter or darker if at all) and test out the stock of text & cover weight papers that they have available for printing. We strongly recommend asking them to provide you with matte photo papers. Often they will upgrade to these photo papers at no charge. Also consider looking through their large selection of paper stock that include many colors & textures (pearlescent, metallics, linen, canvas textures, etc). Make sure your local office supply shop uses Adobe Reader® software for opening & printing our PDF files. Other programs such as Adobe Pro®, will not work properly.

My printables are printing smaller than they are suppose to be–how do I fix this?

We bet that you are not printing at 100% scale.  In Adobe Reader®’s print window, set “Page Scaling” to “None”.

Can I edit your printable files?

Our files are password protected and the data inside them can not be extracted or the file can not  be opened in any imaging  editing program.

What are Text Editable files?

These files have text field boxes in them.  You can open these files in Adobe Reader® and personalize the files your self for an added personal touch.

I get a + symbol  in some of my text field boxes and they are also printed on the printables–how can I get rid of them?

If you are seeing the + symbol inside your text field boxes, it means that there are extra “spaces” inside the text box.  Simply place your cursor after the very last letter inside your text box and delete any extra spaces after them.  You can also use this simple setting change under your preferences in Adobe Reader® to make the + symbols invisible.

Any more tips on printables?

We have a lot of fun tips for using printables in our GALLERY page–come check them out!

Above written work is ©Paper Glitter 2012 . Any reproduction of this article is forbidden and protected by international copyright laws.