Got burned by a bad print scaling error on a big job last month

I was working on a set of architectural plans for a commercial build in Portland and the architect sent me a PDF with a scaling issue that I didn't catch until after I printed 40 sheets. Cost me $120 in paper and toner plus three hours of rework to fix the whole thing. Has anyone else had a client's file mess up your output like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

young.thomas12d ago

@nina_hall48 wait, you had to reset the whole file yourself after they blamed you for their bad PDF?

nina_hall4812d ago

Dude, that exact thing happened to me last February on a 50-sheet run for a local coffee shop menu. The PDF was set to "legal" but my program read it as "letter" so the images were all squished and half the text got cut off. I didn't notice until I flipped through the stack, wasted like $80 in heavy cardstock and spent two hours re-setting the file myself because the client swore it wasn't his fault.

alice_allen512d ago

The real kicker nobody talks about is that most print shops don't even test-print a single page before running the full batch because they're trying to save time. I worked at a shop where the owner would literally force us to skip the proof because "it's just a menu reprint" and then act shocked when the whole order came out jacked up. That $80 mistake is honestly cheap compared to what happens when you're running 500 business cards with a transposed phone number that nobody caught lol.