What are the default margins in browser print settings?

Question

Does anyone know how many inches are, by default, applied to the top and bottom margins of pages in web print? Specifically for IE and Chrome? Is it half an inch maybe?

I'm asking because I'm writing some css code for adding headers and footers and have adopted a strategy that will use inches to set the heights of the divs on the page.

Answer 1

If you want consistency across browsers, you probably want to set the margins consistently rather than rely on the default values. You can do this with @page CSS:

@page {
    margin-top: 0.75in;
    margin-bottom: 0.75in;
    margin-left: 0.75in;
    margin-right: 0.75in;    
}

Since printers themselves also have minimum margin sizes, and those vary by model and manufacturer, it's generally safest to not use a margin under 0.5inches.

Answer 2

• Internet Explorer 0.75 inch.
• Chrome 0.4 inch.
• Firefox 0.5 inch

References

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-printing-problems-firefox

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/forum/ie8-windows_7/what-are-the-default-print-margins-for-ie-678-and/632198b6-d3b7-449a-853a-db8a745bf56e