MS Word adds extraneous ~2 cm margin on the left regardless of margin settings

Question

Whenever I print a document in Word 2019, the left margin on the printout is much greater than the one seen in both the Print Layout view and the Print Preview dialog, by about 2cm (other margins are maybe a bit larger, too, but not noticeably so). This happens regardless of margin settings.

I already checked printer's properties and made sure there's no scaling done by the printer driver. This also doesn't happen on other machines which have the same Windows version (Windows 10 21H2) or Windows 7 and use the same printer, but have Word 2007 or 2010 installed.

Answer 1

In File->Options->Advanced, Print section, uncheck the Scale content for A4 or 8.5 x 11" paper sizes checkbox.

This setting causes Word, when printing to A4, to silently scale down the contents as if it was printed on a Letter-sized sheet. It has been present since at least Office 2003 and is apparently on by default since at least Office 2019. In Office 365, it's gone and replaced by an option to scale for an arbitrary paper size, hidden deep in the Print dialog, under the "N pages per sheet" option, with scaling for Letter again being the default.

Apparently, it was intended to ease the exchange of documents between Europe and US: this way, printouts on both A4 and Letter would have exactly the same pagination and dimensions -- but on a larger A4, some space would be wasted as a result.

Looks like by making this approach the default (instead of, say, scaling down A4-formatted documents only when printed to Letter thus keeping pagination but not the dimensions), MS, a US-based company, chose to unconditionally favor Letter at the expense of the rest of the world.