How to print an ID card front and back on one page

ID cards are 85.60 × 53.98 mm. Print dialogs default to “fit to page”. Put those two facts together and your copy comes out oversized.

There is a small errand almost everyone runs eventually: an office wants a copy of both sides of your ID card on a single sheet of paper. A bank, a landlord, a university, a visa centre, an employer. The instruction is always short — "both sides, one page" — and it sounds like the easiest thing in the world.

Then the copy comes back rejected, and nobody tells you why. Often it is not the photograph at all. It is the size.

Identity cards have an exact size, and the person checking knows it

Almost every national identity card in the world is the same physical object: 85.60 × 53.98 mm. That is a real standard — ID-1, the same format as the bank card in your wallet. Aadhaar, the Spanish DNI, the Vietnamese CCCD, the Indonesian KTP, most driving licences: if your card is the same size as a credit card, it is an ID-1 card.

You do not need to remember the number. You need to remember what it implies: a copy of an ID card is supposed to be the same size as the ID card. The clerk comparing your sheet to the card in their hand is doing exactly that comparison, consciously or not. A card printed 15% too large looks wrong immediately, in a way that is hard to articulate and easy to reject.

The thing that silently breaks it

Here is the part that catches people, and it has nothing to do with your camera.

Print dialogs default to "Fit to page." It is a sensible default for most documents — it makes sure nothing falls off the edge. Applied to a sheet with two card-sized frames on it, it does something else: it scales the whole page up to fill the printable area, and both cards come out oversized. Your file was correct. Your printer enlarged it.

The fix is one setting: set the scale to 100%, sometimes labelled "Actual size" or "Default". Not "Fit", not "Shrink to fit", not "Scale to paper size". If the dialog offers a percentage box, 100 is the number.

This single setting is the difference between a copy that gets accepted and one that gets sent back, and it is almost never mentioned in the instructions the office gives you.

What a correct sheet looks like

  1. Both sides on one sheet. Front above, back below. Not two separate pages, not two files — offices asking for "one page" usually mean it literally, because they are going to file or scan a single sheet.
  2. Each side at 85.60 × 53.98 mm. Same size as the physical card.
  3. Straight, not tilted. A photograph taken by hand is a trapezoid; a copy is a rectangle. Perspective correction fixes that, cropping does not.
  4. Readable at print size. If you cannot read the smallest print on the paper copy, neither can the person checking it.
  5. Printed at 100% scale. See above. This is the one that ruins otherwise perfect files.

Check it yourself in five seconds

This is the part I would actually like people to take away, because it needs no tools and no trust.

Put your real card on top of the printed copy. The printed frame should disappear underneath it — same width, same height, edges lining up. If the printed card is visibly bigger than the real one, your print dialog was set to fit-to-page. Change the scale to 100% and print it again.

That check costs five seconds and catches the size problem before the person at the counter does. It also works on a copy someone else made for you at a print shop, which is worth knowing, because shops run "fit to page" all day.

Doing it without a scanner

Most people no longer own a flatbed scanner, which is why this errand became annoying in the first place. A phone photograph of each side, straightened and placed at card size, does the job — that is the whole workflow, and it is what we built LensUp to do: photograph the front, photograph the back, and the two land on one A4 sheet at their real size, ready to print or send as a PDF.

A note on where the file goes, because of what this file is. An ID card copy is one of the most sensitive documents you will ever create. Many online tools in this category upload your document to a server to process it and send you back a result. Ours does the work inside the browser tab, and your files are never uploaded — and you can verify that claim rather than take it on faith: open your browser's developer tools, go to the Network tab, clear it, then make the copy and watch whether your file's bytes leave. I would encourage that check with any tool that touches your ID, ours included.

Two things worth doing regardless of the tool

Treat every copy of an ID as sensitive after you make it. The PDF sits in your downloads folder, then in an email thread, then in someone's inbox. Delete the local copy when the errand is done. If a form only needs one side, send one side.

Keep the file small without making it unreadable. Portals frequently cap uploads at 200 KB or 500 KB. Compressing toward a target is best-effort by nature — an honest tool steps quality down until the file fits rather than promising an exact byte count — so after compressing, open the result and confirm the card number is still legible. A file that meets the size limit but cannot be read fails for a different reason than one that is too big, and both mean a second trip.

If you would rather do this than think about it: put both sides of an ID on one page, print at 100%, and lay your card on the result before you hand it over.

LensUp in 56 seconds

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