Home printing has one enormous advantage over a print shop: it is eleven at night, you have realised forty is not enough, and you can simply print more. That is worth a great deal in the week of a funeral.
What it costs you is a small amount of care over four things.
1. Paper — the decision that matters most
Ordinary 20 lb copier paper is why home-printed programs feel homemade. It is thin enough to see the reverse through, and it goes limp in a warm room.
- 32 lb text — the sweet spot. Noticeably heavier, folds crisply, runs through nearly every home printer without complaint.
- Light cardstock (65 lb cover) — feels superb, but check your printer takes it and expect to feed it a few sheets at a time.
- Matte, not glossy — glossy shows fingerprints, and every one of these gets handled.
A ream costs a few dollars more than copier paper and is the cheapest upgrade available to you. Buy more than you need; it is the one thing you cannot improvise at midnight.
2. The printer setting everyone gets wrong
In the print dialog, choose Actual Size or 100%. Not Fit to Page.
"Fit to page" adds the printer's own margin and shrinks the whole design by a few percent. The result is not obviously broken — it is just slightly small, slightly off-centre, and wrong in a way people feel without being able to name. It is the single most common reason a good design prints badly at home.
Print one copy first and fold it before you print two hundred. Check the fold lands where the design expects, that nothing important sits in the crease, and that the reverse is the right way up on a double-sided run.
3. Double-sided and folding
If your printer does double-sided automatically, use it — it gets the alignment right more reliably than you will by hand. If it does not, print all the fronts, then reload and print the backs, and test the paper orientation with two sheets before committing.
Fold with a bone folder or the back of a spoon along a ruler. A pressed fold looks deliberate; a hand-creased one does not. For a stack, fold five or six at a time at most — more and the outer sheets slip.
4. How many
The usual guidance is one per two attendees. The usual regret is running out. Programs cost pennies each and people take them home, sometimes two — one for themselves and one for someone who could not come.
Print a hundred if you expect fifty people. The spare ones are not waste; they go to family members later, and the family will want them for years.
When to use a print shop instead
- More than about 150 copies — home printers get slow and cartridges get expensive.
- Heavy cardstock your printer will not feed.
- You want a scored fold rather than a creased one, which is visibly cleaner.
- You would simply rather not be doing this at eleven at night, which is a good enough reason.
If you use a shop, ask for the file with bleed and crop marks rather than the home-printer version, and tell them the trim size — a folded program on legal stock is not what a shop assumes if you do not say so.
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We hand you a PDF at the true trim size, ready to print at home or to send to a shop.
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