Mark,
I don’t think I’ve been fortunate. I teach lightroom at my store, and my staff at the store print using Lightroom daily to an 11880, a r3000 and a 3880. We have a very diverse size of prints we make, and each day some of them will be printed with a preset because it’s a common size, others without using a preset because they are unique When someone is having trouble getting it to work properly, I haven’t found a circumstance where they weren’t doing something not quite right (yet anyway).
I will admit your screenshot does look strange and if it prints differently than it looks it is difficult to try and figure out why. Without seeing screenshots of all of your dialog boxes it’s impossible to tell if you are doing things the same way I would. I’ve tried to duplicate your problem while traveling (other than “printing” it, but I’m pretty confident that what I see in the Lightroom preview window will be accurate) and I can’t duplicate what your screenshot shows. The only times I’ve had issues with this as when I entered something incorrectly. Again I don’t know what settings you have entered where, so it’s impossible to duplicate your exact circumstance.
So not that you are doing any of these, but more for the benefit of those following this post and having similar issues, 90% of the time I see students or my staff have issues with this, one of 3 things is the reason.
1. They have transposed the width and height box in the custom paper setup screen, entering the width of the paper based on the orientation of the print. The printer doesn’t care about that, it only wants to know how wide is the sheet of paper, and how long it is. So if you enter 19” wide by 13” high because your print is going to be that size and is landscape orientation, you can run into problems, the typical symptom is the print is cutoff in weird places and only a piece of it printed. I you are printing a landscape print on 13”x19” paper, you still enter 13” in the width and 19 in the height, they you click the landscape orientation.
2. They have chosen a preset in the Print Settings dialog to set up the printer settings (paper type, feed path, resolution). Lightroom can’t handle this. It can store all of the settings you make in the Printer Settings dialog box inside of the Lightroom preset, but it doesn’t seem to be able to handle the fact that a preset was used in this dialog. To be reliable this dialog must always be left to “Default Settings”. Even if the chosen preset correctly sets all of the correct information, the fact that something other than “default settings” is used, it will almost always cause problems if you save the settings while the preset is selected.
3. After making a change they click on the preset to save it, before they right click on it to store the changes. As soon as you make any tweak to any setting, whether it is one of the 2 printer dialog boxes or the Lightroom settings on the right, LR will de-select your preset. I’ve frequently seen users think they need to re-select that preset and then right click it to set the new settings. Of course as soon as you click to select it, LR reverts to the settings in the preset so your changes are gone and it looks as though LR “forgot” the changes, when in fact they were never saved in the preset. It’s a little bit of an odd interface thing, but you have to right click the preset while it is not highlighted and select update with current settings. As soon as you do, it should highlight.
As I mentioned, you easily could have an issue that I can’t duplicate, it’s not like computers don’t do weird things at times, and so it could be you are doing everything the same as I would but getting an odd result. I’ve never had a circumstance where using the print button doesn’t work but clicking the printer button then immediately the print button would. (although this might be related to using a preset in the printer settings dialog). without screenshots of all dialog boxes it’s pretty hard to try and pinpoint if there is anything might be doing differently than I do.
I would be great to sort it out, if there is truly a bug, or if perhaps there’s something your are doing a little differently that logically should work but for some reason LR doesn’t like.