How to Print Shooting Targets to Exact Scale (A4 and US Letter)

To print shooting targets to scale, one setting decides it: print at 100%, never “fit to page”. Send an A4 target to a US Letter printer with fit-to-page on and it lands at 94.1% — a 2-inch dot prints as 1.88 inches, an 8-inch scoring ring as 7.53 inches, and every score you write down after that is measured against the wrong ruler.

Nothing on the page warns you. The target looks right, the rings look round, and the only symptom is that your numbers stop meaning what you think they mean.

Why targets print small

A4 and US Letter are close enough to look interchangeable and different enough to break a scale drawing. A4 is 210 × 297 mm (8.27 × 11.69 in). Letter is 215.9 × 279.4 mm (8.5 × 11 in) — wider, but almost 0.7 inches shorter.

When a PDF page does not match the paper in the tray, the print dialog shrinks it until the whole page fits. It picks the smaller of the two ratios, and for A4 on Letter the height is what binds:

A 6% error sounds like nothing. On a B-8 it moves the 9-ring from 5.54 inches to 5.21, which is roughly the difference between an honest 9 and a generous 10 — in your favor, every time, on every shot you fire for the rest of that target’s life.

Print at 100%: the setting, by application

Every reader has a different print path, and the trap is that most of them default to fitting rather than to actual size. The defaults below are the ones that bite:

Two rules cover all of them. Download the format that matches your paper — every DrillLane target ships as a separate A4 file and a separate US Letter file, so the shrink never has to happen. Then confirm the scale control says 100 or “actual”, not “fit”, “shrink oversized pages”, or “auto”.

Verify the first copy with a ruler

Settings lie. Printer drivers apply their own margins, “borderless” modes stretch the page, and a shared office printer can carry a scale override you never set. Measure once, on the first sheet, and you are done for good — the settings stick and every later print inherits them.

Every DrillLane target has a calibration mark in the footer for exactly this. It is a bracket with a tick at each end, labelled 1 in / 25.4 mm. Put a ruler across it, outer tick to outer tick. If it reads 1 inch, the whole sheet is at true scale and you can stop thinking about it. If it reads about 15/16 of an inch, you printed an A4 file on Letter paper with fitting enabled.

That one mark replaces everything below, but the underlying dimensions are published anyway — partly so you can cross-check the mark itself, and partly so a target you printed from somewhere else can be checked too:

If the number is short by roughly 6%, you printed an A4 file on Letter paper with fitting on. Short by roughly 3%, and it is a Letter file on A4. Anything else points at the printer driver rather than the dialog.

What bad scale actually costs you

It depends on what the target is for, and the cost is worse than most shooters assume.

Scored targets inflate your score. Every ring on a shrunken B-8 is smaller, so a shot that should have caught the 9 falls into the 8 — but the ring it lands in is labelled the same. Run a 50-round course of fire on a 94% B-8 and compare it to a match-issued one and the numbers will not reconcile. Worse, the error is systematic: it moves in one direction, quietly, forever, which makes it invisible to the “my scores look consistent” check.

Accuracy standards stop being standards. Dot Torture is calibrated around a 2-inch dot at 3 yards. Shrink the dot to 1.88 inches and you have quietly made the drill harder than the one everyone else is comparing scores on. The whole point of a named drill is that your 47/50 and a stranger’s 47/50 mean the same thing.

Zero targets give you bad corrections. A grid target is a ruler you shoot at. Count two squares of offset on a grid printed at 94% and you will report 2.00 inches when the paper actually says 1.88 — you dial a correction that is 6% too large, at a distance where you cannot see the error and will blame the rifle. The 50-yard zero confirmation is only as good as the inch it is printed at.

Timed drills are the one exception. If you are shooting a Bill Drill purely against the clock and scoring pass/fail on hits, a few percent of A-zone will not change your life. It still changes what “A-zone” means, and it will bite the day you compare your time to a published standard.

A4 or US Letter — which file to download

Pick by the paper you own, not by where you live, though the two usually agree. The United States, Canada and Mexico run on Letter. Essentially everywhere else runs on A4.

The two formats are not the same drawing scaled — the artwork is laid out separately for each so that the scoring geometry stays at true size on both. That is also why a Letter target can look slightly more cramped top-to-bottom: it has 0.69 inches less height to work with, and the geometry is not allowed to shrink to compensate.

One practical note on margins: consumer printers cannot print to the edge, and typically reserve 4–6 mm on each side. Our layouts keep everything inside a safe area, but if a printer is set to “borderless” it may stretch the page to fake an edge-to-edge print — which is fit-to-page wearing a different hat. Leave borderless off.

Print once, then print in batches

Once the first sheet measures correctly, the rest is logistics. A few habits worth copying:

• Print grayscale, not color. Our targets are outline-only by design — no filled black bullseye — specifically so a range day does not cost a toner cartridge.
• Print the whole session at once. Work out the round count first, then print one target per string you plan to shoot. The plan configurator gives you the drill list and the ammo count in one pass, so you know how many sheets to run.
• Keep one verified master. Measure a single sheet, write the date on it, and keep it in the range bag. When a new printer produces something that looks off, you have a reference to hold it against.
• Scan the QR code. Every target carries one in the corner, linking to the drill it belongs to — useful when the sheet ends up in someone else’s hands at the range.

Why we are particular about this

Because we got it wrong ourselves. Our US Letter files were, for a period, generated by rendering the A4 layout onto Letter paper — which produced exactly the 91–94% shrink described above. It was invisible on screen and invisible in a print preview. It only surfaced when we opened the finished PDFs and measured the ring diameters programmatically against the specification.

Every DrillLane target is now rendered natively per format and measured against its intended dimensions before it ships. The calibration mark exists for the same reason: a target you cannot verify is a target you should not score on, and “trust us” is not verification. The mark hands the check to you, on the sheet, in two seconds.

Sources

• ISO 216 defines A4 as 210 × 297 mm; ANSI/ASME Y14.1 defines ANSI A (“Letter”) as 8.5 × 11 in. Both are summarised, with the full series, in the paper size reference.
• Chrome’s own print documentation — the print dialog whose “Default” scale setting is fit-to-page rather than 100%.
• NRA B-8 repair center specification — X 1.695 in, 10-ring 3.36 in, 9-ring 5.54 in, 8-ring 8.00 in. Our printable B-8 reproduces these dimensions exactly.
• Scale factors in the first table are computed directly from the two paper sizes; you can reproduce them with a calculator in under a minute.