Printing/Preview does not honour to printer page margins and garbles text

Question

I have this weird problem with printing. When I print, e.g., a pdf using preview, the page comes out of the printer incorrectly, that is the top 2.2cm gets chopped off and some of the characters have become unreadable (especially the I, the :, and the J). When I print the same pdf from adobe reader, the page comes out fine...
The problem of chopping-off the top bit of a page also happens when I print directly from an application (e.g., thunderbird, firefox). Saving the print as PDF and printing that one with adobe reader again works fine.
The problems occurs only when I print on my Lexmark Optra E312L (using the generic Postscript printer). On our HP Photo Printer (B9180), everything works as expected.
I have already restarted the printing system, but while this did solve another printing problem, I still have this problem.
So my question is: anyone else experiencing similar problems (ie., top of print chopped-off and garbled text) and, better yet, is there a solution?
Thanks,
Hayo

Answer 1

Steve, thank you for trying to answer my question/solve my problem!
You suggestions, however do not fully help in my case though
I was already using the full printing dialogue, but nowhere did I find anything that might solve this problem. The print scaling, I did not want to use as I want the page to come out as-is (the pdf was an A4 and I print to A4). Note: border less printing or other ways of selecting a larger printable area doesn't work either; when I select the Lexmark, I have a very limited number of page size options and while it shows them, I can't use a custom page size (otherwise that could have solved the problem I guess).
I did expect some things to get chopped-off but then evenly from all sides (ie, where it can't print). This is not what happens when printing from preview though. Today I tried again and while the results are the same, I now understand better what Preview does: it chops off only the top bit (what it does left and right, I don't know yet). In my opinion this is an error on the part of Preview because that way you never get the page exactly as it was intended. Adobe Reader does this much better, so that is what I will be using from now on.
The other problem, the garbled text (mostly i's, j's, and :'s) is still there as well. So I guess there must be a problem in the printing engine of Preview in combination with the generic postscript driver...
Heck, it gets even more interesting: I also tested printing from Firefox directly. This results in an error flashing on the printer, the printout got out of the printer ok-ish though. When saving the output as PDF and printing that with Adobe Reader again, the printer does not generate an error AND (more importantly), the output is much better quality wise (the rendering of the fonts and greys is much better).
Right, I guess the lesson I learned here is not to use Preview/print directly when I want to print to the Lexmark and to take the route PDF->Adobe Reader->Lexmark instead.
Is there a way I can let Apple know about bugs? (the garbled text certainly is a bug, the other things may or may not).
Thanks again,
Hayo