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A fax that loses its bottom edge is almost always a size mismatch: the sender scanned a longer page than your paper, and your machine's auto-reduction setting is off. Turning on auto-reduction (sometimes called RX reduction) lets the machine shrink each page slightly so the whole thing fits on your paper.
Fax has no concept of "fit to page" between the two machines. The sender's machine scans whatever is fed into it and transmits the image at its scanned length; your machine prints what arrives onto whatever paper is loaded. When those lengths differ, something has to give, and with reduction off, the machine simply stops printing at the bottom of its own paper. The rest of the page is lost.
The most common mismatch is legal-size paper (longer) arriving at a machine loaded with letter-size paper. The sender fed 14-inch pages; your tray holds 11-inch paper; the last three inches of every page vanish. The reverse happens too, and the international version is A4 arriving at letter-size machines or vice versa, since A4 is slightly narrower and longer than US letter. If the missing strip is small, a quarter inch or less, the culprit is more likely the header line: your machine prints the sender's ID at the top and pushes everything else down, shaving the bottom.
Look in the fax settings menu for "Auto Reduction," "RX Reduction," or "Reduce to Fit." When it is on, the machine measures each incoming page against the paper in the tray and scales the image down just enough to fit. The text gets slightly smaller, but nothing is lost.
A few things to know about this setting:
Then the problem is probably on the sender's side. Some senders scan at a paper size their software mislabels: the document is physically letter-size, but the scanner driver tags it as A4, and the receiving machine trusts the tag. Ask the sender to check their scan settings and re-send. Another sender-side cause is cropping in a fax app: some online fax services trim margins when converting a PDF to a fax image, and the trim takes the bottom with it.
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| A few inches missing from every page | Legal-size pages arriving at letter-size paper | Turn on auto-reduction, or load legal paper |
| A thin strip missing, under half an inch | Header line pushes content down | Enable reduction; some machines let you print the header on a separate line |
| Whole bottom half missing | Sender scanned at wrong size or the call dropped mid-page | Ask sender to re-send; check their scan size setting |
| Only some faxes are cut off | Those senders use a different page size | Auto-reduction handles this automatically |
No. Once the machine prints the page with the bottom missing, the cropped image is what you have; the machine does not keep a full-size copy to reprint. The sender has to re-send with the size settings corrected. That is why this problem is worth fixing at the setting level rather than per fax: every re-send costs both sides another call.
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