: What home printer would allow for exact alignment of front and back? Note: I'm not a graphic designer, but this seemed like the most relevant place to post. Feel free to send me off somewhere

@Correia448

As others have said, there are probably no personal, mechanical printers with the type of accuracy that you want. However, you can still accomplish it at home through silk screening (screen printing).

With a bit of setup you can align the paper (registration), silk screen one side, turn it over, align it again, and silk screen the other side. I recommend doing one side in a batch and then the other side in a batch, in order to give the ink a little drying time.

Here is a detailed explanation of the full process:

The Printing Process: Screen Printing

Here is a product that makes making the stencil quick and simple:

EZScreen

Note that I have never used this product and have no experience or connection with it. I’m mentioning it solely to show that there are ways of making screen printing much easier than it used to be. It’s also likely that there are lots of kits at your local craft or hobby shop and you can find supplies on sites like Amazon too.

Once you have the setup you should be able to quickly turn out your lined pages in nearly any quantity you need, nearly any time you need them.

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@Ravi4787994

Its called "registration", and you can improve it by specifying offsets in the printer based on your measurements. Typically you print targets (crosses) in four corners of the page (also known as registration targets, and often an option in advanced page composition software). The targets can be seen by either looking at a double sided page through strong light, or better, printed on a transparency.

Obviously there are limits to this based on the accuracy of the printer. If it is moving from page to page, that is your limit of accuracy. Using the above method you will find out rapidly what that accuracy limit is.

Why would you want to do this? Its standard for printing books.

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@Murray976

Depending on what you need to "print", a plotter-type device might work for you. These are typically sold for home use as vinyl/paper cutting machines, but some also have pen attachments for drawing line art.

This page on Silhouette's website shows one of the products in action.

For this to work, you could only "print" line art, and production speed would be low because you'd have to manually flip over the paper and ensure it was lined up perfectly on one of the marked mats that feed sheets into the machine. I've been able to get pretty accurate results when using the cutting heads, and the pens work exactly the same way.

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@Goswami567

The only kind of sheet fed printers I know of that can achieve accurate registration are printing presses. They have suckers to lift each sheet, and mechanical lays to push or pull the paper into the exact same position for printing.

This is what they typically look like


I've never seen anything like this for home or office digital printers like inkjets or laser printers. They have simple feed rollers that feed the sheets by friction. So your only real option is to have the paper printed commercially on a press.

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@Murray976

None.

End user printers are not designed for perfect registrations. None of them. It should always be expected that paper will shift and move slightly and never be pulled through the printer in the exact same way twice. This even includes printers specifically designed for duplex printing. The nature of sheetfed laser or inkjets just does not allow for exact paper feed every time.

The only way to ensure proper registration is to get things printed via a commercial print provider.

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