Margin on a4 paper is too big

Question

I'm currently writing on a document for school. We have to use these margins:

• left: 3cm
• bottom and top: 2.5cm
• right: 2cm

But when I'm using the geometry package the margins are way too big which means that when it's printed all the margins are about 1 or 1.5 cm too big. This is my whole preamble:

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,oneside]{article}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{phv}
\renewcommand{\sfdefault}{phv}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=3cm,right=2cm,top=2.5cm,bottom=2.5cm]{geometry}
\onehalfspacing

Could you please suggest a solution?

Answer 1

If I print the document based on the code below on my printer to A4-paper (on Scientific Linux 6, Adobe Reader with the settings in the image below) I get a left margin of 3 cm, a top and bottom margin of 2.6 or 2.7 cm and a right margin of 2 cm.

I quickly measured with a cheap plastic ruler, so within an uncertainty of 2 mm I get the same as your requirements :)

It thus seems to be a printer problem on your side.

And - only as a snide remark - it might be good to try to pursue your school that these margins (and font settings) don't really make sense for a nice document. But that's completely unrelated to your problem.

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper,oneside]{article}
\usepackage{setspace}
\usepackage[ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{phv}
\renewcommand{\sfdefault}{phv}
\usepackage[a4paper,left=3cm,right=2cm,top=2.5cm,bottom=2.5cm]{geometry}
\onehalfspacing
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\lipsum
\end{document}