Coloring Page Maker
Guide

Printing coloring pages at home

A page that looks perfect on screen can print grey, clipped, or blotchy. Almost all of it comes down to five decisions — three made before you print, and two inside the print dialog.

1. Line thickness, decided before you print

An inkjet or laser printer has a practical floor below which a line stops being reliably solid. Around one point — about a third of a millimetre — is where most home printers begin to break lines into dashes, particularly on absorbent paper or when the cartridge is running low.

This is why line thickness here is specified in millimetres on the page rather than in pixels. The Thin setting targets 0.35 mm, which sits just above that floor; Medium is 0.6 mm; Thick is 1 mm. Because the measurement is anchored to the printed page, the same setting produces the same physical line whether the artwork is scaled up or down to fit.

If a page is going to be photocopied rather than printed directly, choose one step thicker than you otherwise would. Each copy generation loses a little edge definition, and thin lines are the first casualty.

2. Paper

Paper weight is measured in grams per square metre, and it decides whether colour stays on the page it was applied to.

  • 80 gsm — ordinary printer paper. Fine for pencils and crayons, which sit on the surface.
  • 120 gsm — noticeably stiffer. The right choice for felt-tip pens, which will otherwise bleed through and mark whatever is underneath.
  • 160 gsm and above — card stock territory. Necessary for anything wet, and worth it for pages that will be handled repeatedly, pinned up, or posted.

Avoid glossy photo paper entirely. It is designed to hold ink on its surface, which is the opposite of what a crayon or pencil needs, and colour simply skids across it.

3. Margins and page size

Every printer has an unprintable border it physically cannot reach, usually between 3 and 6 mm. Artwork placed inside that border is silently clipped. Pages from this tool are centred inside a 12 mm margin, which clears the unprintable area on essentially all consumer printers while still leaving the artwork comfortably large.

Choose the page size that matches your paper. A4 measures 210 by 297 mm; US Letter is 216 by 279 mm — slightly wider and noticeably shorter. Printing an A4 file on Letter paper generally works, but the printer will scale it, and the margin you were relying on shifts with it.

4. Print dialog settings that matter

This is where most disappointing prints are created. Three settings do nearly all the damage.

  • Scale: Actual size, not Fit to page. Fit to page adds its own margin on top of the one already built into the file, shrinking the artwork and, on some drivers, clipping it instead.
  • Quality: Normal or Text, not Photo. Photo mode applies dithering intended for continuous-tone images. On pure black line art it produces soft, grey-looking edges and uses considerably more ink.
  • Colour: Black and white or Grayscale. The page contains no colour, but colour mode will still mix black from several cartridges on many inkjets, giving a slightly brown or blue-tinged line and wasting ink.

Turn off Economy or Draft mode. It saves ink by printing fewer dots, which is precisely the wrong economy on artwork made entirely of thin lines.

5. Watch how much of the page is black

A coloring page should be mostly white. The preview reports the percentage of the page covered in ink, and it is a useful number: below about 15% is comfortable, and above about a third the page is both expensive to print and unsatisfying to colour, because there is little white space left to fill.

If the figure is high, lower the Detail setting rather than trying to fix it at the printer. Detail controls how strong a boundary must be before it becomes a line, so reducing it removes the weakest, noisiest lines first — which are the ones contributing most of the darkness and least of the picture.

Quick checklist

  1. Choose thickness for the audienceThick for young children and for anything to be photocopied.
  2. Match page size to your paperA4 or US Letter, portrait or landscape.
  3. Download the PDFIt carries the paper size, so the printer will not guess.
  4. Set Actual size and Normal qualityTurn off Fit to page, Photo mode, and Draft mode.
  5. Print one before printing thirtyEspecially before a class set.
Make a page to print

Frequently asked questions

Why do my lines print grey instead of black?

Almost always because the printer is treating the page as a photograph and dithering it. Set the print quality to Normal or Text rather than Photo, make sure any Economy or Draft mode is off, and check that scaling is set to Actual size rather than Fit to page.

Why is part of my page cut off?

The PDF places artwork inside a 12 mm margin precisely to avoid this, so a clipped page usually means the print dialog applied its own scaling on top. Choose Actual size, or 100%, and disable Fit to printable area.

What paper weight is best?

Standard 80 gsm printer paper is fine for pencils and crayons. For felt-tip pens, 120 gsm or heavier prevents bleed-through. For anything involving paint or water, 160 gsm or card stock is the minimum worth attempting.

Should I print A4 or US Letter?

Choose whichever matches the paper in your printer. A4 is 210 by 297 mm and standard outside North America; US Letter is 216 by 279 mm and standard within it. Printing one on the other works but shifts the margins slightly.