Epson borderless prints on custom paper sizes

Archived from groups: comp.periphs.printers (More info?)

Has anyone ever discovered any way to trick any Epson printer drivers
into doing borderless prints on custom sized paper?

Here's the background behind my reason:

I print customized gretting cards and announcements for family and
friends (and one day, maybe for more) on either glossy photo or matte
paper. Rarely will my card or announcement be 8.5 x 11. Typically,
it is 8.5 x 5.5 (half page) .. and sometimes, it might be as small as
4.25 x 5.5 (quarter page). The easy-to-find existence of envelopes
for computer generated cards (either half-folded or twice-folded) make
these the ideal sizes to print my cards.

I have resolved the portions of the image lost to overspray on
borderless prints two ways:

One, by specifying borderless in the print driver, then shrinking my
image roughly 98% in my photo application.

Two, I set up a 3x3 "table" in Word (of all things) on a slightly
oversized "virtual" piece of paper (with no margins set in Word,
ignoring the printer minimums). Then, I use the outer cells (now my
"margins" ) in the table to control the final size of the "inner" cell.
Then, I place my work inside that center cell. In the case of the
8.5x5 cards, it's a 3x4 table. The printer driver is also set to
borderless .. but I'm just using Word to "shrink" my image within the
table instead of my photo application.

Both ways get me minimal loss of my creation around the edges of the
paper but still allows just enough overspray for the occasional
(actually, /often/) misaligned paper load since a perfect load every
time is impossible. Anything extremely misloaded I will just hand cut
as necessary, or trash it if it is severely crooked (hasn't happend
yet). I find I get more of my image this way and lose less of it to
the borderless overspraying.

Currently, I print TWO 8.5x5.5 cards back to back on one sheet of
8.5x11 paper, printing borderless, then cut the paper in half with a
straight edge and knife on a cutting board. I've found I can't use
any other form of cutting because I don't get the precision I need.
Because the paper doesn't load 100% straight each time (it never
does), my cut isn't always in the same place on each page (it will be
close, but I need it exact since I leave no space between the two
prints).

Since the overspray on borderless prints requires less precision than
my manual cutting, I thought I had a solution. I would simply pre-cut
my 8.5x11 paper to 8.5x5.5 then print onto that, using the borderless
option (and again minimizing my overspray). This way, I could bulk
cut the paper beforehand without worry of the alignment of the cards
already printed upon it.

Alas, the printer driver is smarter than that! For the 785EPX, I can
only choose certain Epson sized papers on which to print borderless.
When I select a custom paper size, borderless is no longer an option.

I was hoping I could dig around in the registry or some place and find
where the paper sizes are stored, and maybe find a value somewhere I
could change to allow borderless printing on a custom paper size .. or
better yet, make a new paper size of my own that allows borderless
printing to be selected in the printer driver when my special paper is
selected.

If there is no solution, are there other models of Epson printers that
will handle borderless printing on ANY sized media?

I think I'm reading that Canon offers this flexibility, along with the
flexibility within the driver to control the amount of borderless
overspray you are willing to live with in order to maximize your print
without losing any of it. Alas, I want to stick with Epson at this
time.

Thanks in ADVANCE!

++Mark
--
Mark Lancaster