Apple Mail Printing

I work with and support a bunch of people who are addicted to printing e-mail.

I’m trying to figure out how to get Mail to print messages without shrinking the text to minuscule sizes. I usually see that with long threads which cover pages, but this morning I had a less than two page e-mail print relatively small.

I’ve looked in TCO Apple Mail and searched the threads here but didn’t find anything that appears to be relevant.

Thanks.

Cheers,
Jon

I’m trying to picture what you’re saying, as I haven’t seen it myself. So in the print job dialog, the thumbnail of the output is or is not the same (relative) size as the actual output? If it is, have you tried using the Scale setting to increase the size? And in that same dialog, under Paper Handling, is Scale to Fit Paper Size selected, or not?

The message, when seen in Apple Mail, has the appropriate font size, e.g. 12 points.

When printed, the font size for various sections shrinks, often to ludicrously small sizes.

You can see the same if you print a lengthy thread to PDF or Preview.

IMO this is a bug that Apple introduced in Mail somewhere around OS X 10.12.x or maybe 10.11.x, IIRC. Prior to that point, any thread would print “correctly”, not scaling the font size down, regardless of length.

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In my experience since at least Leopard, I have not seen unusual print sizing which was not related to printer settings. This is my common experience for at least six different OS X/macOS systems in various locations.

I suggest creating a new (virgin) account, connecting email on that account to your email provider, and testing for occurrence of this fault. Many “bugs” I have experienced have been determined to be account specific. In one egregious case, I had to create a new account and manually migrated user data, effectively forcing recreation of ~/Library to restore access to the Network Preference Pane. It just did not work until using the new account instance.

I have see the tiny printing in Sierra. I couldn’t duplicate it today but I have definitely experienced it.

Diane