How do I change page size of an existing .pdf?

[rdmartin_1]

I have Adobe Acrobat  XI Pro on my Mac running 10.6.

How do I resize an existing .pdf document that is 20" x 40" down to 4" x 8"?

Thanks!

Bob

[try67 · Accepted solution]

Print it to a new PDF file with that page size...

[Test Screen Name]

Thanks, but...  not really for the original poster, who is on a Mac, the source of the difficulty....

[Jakehotep]

I have an affordable (read: free)  solution to every one of these problems.

I work in Prepress (on a Mac) so I have to do a LOT of funky things with Acrobat.  I've been kicking myself for a few days trying to find a way to take a customer's crops out and reduce the actual page (NOT crop it, but actually reduce the page size.).

Turns out if you download the (free) PDFwriter app for Mac, you have a virtual printer you can print PDFs to, even out of Acrobat.  Install this, and read the instructions  I'll wait….

1. Open your 20x40" PDF in Acrobat and go to the Print menu.

2. Pull down PDFwriter as your printer of choice.  In the "Page Setup..." dialogue pull down "Paper Size" to "Manage Custom Sizes..."

3. Click on the "plus" sign at the bottom and put in your specs (i.e., Page Size: 4"x8" with NO "Non-printable areas." (You can double-click on the "Untitled" document and change its name to 4x8.)

4. Click OK and make sure you select your new 4x8 custom size in the "Paper Size" pull-down menu.

5. Below that, in the "Scale" box choose 20%. This will reduce your 20x40 page to 4x8. Click OK.

6. Click on the "Printer..." button at bottom and pull down "Printer Features" from the "Layout" drop-down menu.

7. Where it says "Output Resolution," change it to anything you want.  (Since I work in high-end stuff, I usually select either 600, 1200 or 2400 dpi.  You don't need to go over 300 dpi if you're dealing with photos or grayscale pages, or if you don't care about the quality that much.  600 is usually fine.  Obviously, higher resolution will result in larger file sizes.)

8. Hit the "Print" button.  One last thing, In the main dialogue, you want to click on the "Advanced" tab at bottom and make sure "Print As Image" is turned OFF.

9. Go ahead and print.  You'll find your new (resized) page in the PDFwriter folder.

If you're worried about file size being too large:

1. Open the new 4x8 PDF.

2. Click Command-D for "Properties" and click on the "Description" tab.

3. If the File Size is over 5MB, close this dialogue and pull down "File" > "Save As" > Optimized PDF...

4. (The following assumes you still want a pretty decent PDF when finished.) In the various tabs, do NOT downsample any images and don't apply any compression.  Do NOT unembed any fonts.  I usually don't use "Optimize the PDF for fast web view" either.

5. Hit "OK" at lower right and give the new PDF a new name (I usually use the same name and put "_opt" before the PDF extension).

6. Open the new PDF and check the Properties again.  The file should be substantially smaller.

If anyone has any questions about this procedure, or would like to know how to do something similar, please don't hesitate to contact me. Hope this helps!

[mattthewb99944239]

This is the actual correct answer:

https://acrobatusers.com/tutorials/how-to-resize-pages-in-a-pdf-file

[Test Screen Name]

InDesign doesn't open PDFs. It can PLACE PDF files. Strongly advise against Photoshop as it will rasterise.

[johnmc1953]

I know this is an old thread but I came across it trying to find an answer to the same question because I had created a PDF from a number of jpgs that I needed to OCR. Acrobat Pro told me that the pages were too large for text recognition. Once I realised tat there seemed to be no solution, I did a bit of experimenting and found the definitive answer.

Open the pdf using Mac's preview app. Then print to pdf and, VOILA!, a file with the correct sized pages.

Hope this helps others in despair.

[John__SLS_Publicity_]

johnmc1953's tip definitely worked for me today, extremely useful tip. Thank you.

[johnmc1953]

You're welcome.

[AnandSri · Accepted solution]

Hello Johnmc,

Sorry for the delayed response and inconvenience caused. Please refer to the following Adobe article and discussion which discuss about resizing a PDF RESIZE PDF

You can also refer to the Adobe article Scale or resize printed pages in Acrobat and Reader

Feel free to update this discussion for any further assistance.

Regards,

Anand Sri.