Is there a way to change the page margins used when you print RTF documents? I find the default margins (approx 1.5") way too large and would love to reduce them.
No, that’s not possible. The only workaround is to print the document with a third-party software.
Thanks for confirming. It’s unfortunate to have to use another application just to print, but at least its a workaround.
Would adjustable print margins be a possibility for a future feature?
Definitely possible but not in the near future as other projects have a much higher priority at the moment.
I don’t print RTF documents often, but when I do Pages has done a nice job for me. Margins are adjustable, unlike in DEVONthink or TextEdit.
Good idea. I’ve been using Mellel as my “print engine” for DevonThink. Mellel lets you create sets of commonly used page margins (e.g. I have one for narrow margins, and another with extra space on the left for 3-ring binders.)
See if this works:
- Select a document that you want to print
- Select File>Print (or hit Cmd-P)
- If your print dialog is small and has a button labeled Show Details, click it to expand the print dialog & show more options
- Click the Paper Size dropdown
- Select Manage Custom Sizes… from the list
- In the Custom Paper Sizes that appears, click the + button to add a new entry. It will be named Untitled.
- With the new Untitled entry selected, hit Enter and type a meaningful name, followed by Enter
- Change the Paper Size and Non-Printable Area (margins) as you wish. Choose User Defined from the Non-Printable Area dropdown to apply the margin settings in the edit fields below the dropdown to your new custom paper size. (If you select a printer in the Non-printable area dropdown, the margins will be set to the printer’s default margins.)
- Click OK to save the new entry
- Print the document.
Your new paper size will be available in other applications as well.
This procedure is available from many apps, but some apps modify the Print dialog so that Paper Size options are not accessible; in this case, choose choose File>Page Setup and in the Page Setup dialog that appears, click the Manage Custom sizes… dropdown and follow the rest of the steps above to manage (and select for use) custom page sizes & margin settings.
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, DevonThink ignores the user-defined margins.
Chiming in here from the future 
DEVONthink definitely ignores the defined margins when printing RTFs – this is supposed to be 1cm page margins all round from a custom page definition:
However, I have found an acceptable (to me) workaround.
Create a document in Word with the desired margins.
Save that file as a .rtf file.
Move that file to the ~/Library/Application Support/DEVONthink/Templates.noindex folder (or a subfolder of same – note that prior versions of DEVONthink may have the version number in their Application Support folder name).
You can use placeholders in the filename to pre-populate name elements as you desire. For example:
looks like this while navigating to the template:
and gives a DEVONthink file a name like this:
Create a new file and play away with it. Note that the font and size specified in DEVONthink’s preferences:
override those in the underlying RTF from Word:
so you’ll end up with this:
To print with the original Word RTF file margins, open the DEVONthink RTF file in TextEdit (Shift-⌘-O) and print from there – the margins are respected:
You could also do most/all of the editing in TextEdit, I guess, but I’ve not tried that.
I’ve used info from other threads here for getting Word (or NisusWriter) .rtf templates into DEVONthink, but this is a collation of what I’ve found/discovered works to get Rich Text documents printing with page margins at a user-defined position.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem possible to modify the margins “on the fly” – you may need to create a few template .rtf files from Word with different margins.
Given that under the hood .rtf is a just a text file-based markup language, it may be possible to create scripts which accept input to set the margins on the fly – I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader for now.
Sean
It would appear @Krioni once made a script for adjusting margins in .rtf files in DEVONthink, but it’s no longer available on their website.
Internet Archive may help there.
I’ve put it on my (now revised) ToDo list, so I may try and track down that script and modify it, or just create something from scratch if I’m feeling like re-inventing a wheel.
Sean