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Exam tables that shift and overflow on a different printer — why, and how to stop it
Two pages at home, three at school, and the answer table cut in half. The cause is not where most people look, and it can be stopped for good.
A paper that prints differently on two machines is something nearly every teacher meets, and it costs you at the worst moment: exam morning, at the school copier, with no time to fix it.
Why an ordinary word processor cannot hold the layout
Word and Google Docs lay the page out when the file is opened, from the fonts on that machine and the printable area its printer driver reports. Two machines that differ in either produce two layouts from one file — the file is not wrong; the layout was simply never fixed.
- A missing font is substituted, the replacement is wider or narrower, a table gains a row, and the page overflows.
- An office laser printer’s printable area is usually narrower than a home printer’s, so a few millimetres vanish from the bottom margin.
- A table sized in percentages stretches with that area; one sized in fixed units does not — mixing both in one paper is the surest way to make it shift.
How far you can get inside Word
- Embed the fonts (File → Options → Save → "Embed fonts in the file"). Removes the first cause.
- Set a bottom margin wider than you think you need — 2 cm rather than 1.5 — to absorb the printable-area difference.
- Turn off "Allow row to break across pages" on the answer table so it moves whole to the next page instead of being cut.
- Convert to PDF before taking it to the copier. This is the most important step and the most often skipped.
If you set papers weekly, the thing worth changing is not the copying routine but where the page gets set. Texva sets every page with the same engine LaTeX uses, at export time — so the screen and the paper are one layout, and the answer table is not cut because its place was decided in advance.
Templates for this
- THPT National Exam (Vietnam)The standard Vietnamese THPT national exam layout: 40 multiple-choice and 6 written questions, with a school header and an answer key.
- 40-Question Multiple-Choice WorksheetA dense two-column, multiple-choice-only review sheet with an answer table at the end.
More posts
- The twelve question types a THPT paper can use, and what each one measuresThe twelve types do not measure the same thing. What each one is actually good at, the cognitive level it fits, and the mistake each one invites.
- Marking answer sheets from a photo — what to get right before you printMarking from a photo is far faster than by hand, but a mistake in preparation mismarks a whole room with nothing looking wrong. Four things to settle first.
- Writing a Circular 5512 lesson plan faster without dropping sectionsA Circular 5512 lesson plan is long because it must be complete, not because it needs a lot of writing. The four slowest parts, and which of them can go.