How to change Margins in PDF?

[_Erik_Little_]

Thank you in advance for your assistance. I am evaluating 8.0 Professional on my pc (XP SP2 w/ 3.5GB of RAM and 2.5GHZ CPU). I want to see if the Professional can modify margins of pdf files that I get from various places but I am not finding anything in the documentation or via google. This should be an easy thing to do, like in MS Word you go to "Page Setup" and change the margins. I cannot find this functionality in Acrobat 8.0. Can someone please tell me how to modify the margins? The document in it's present configuration wastes paper and leaves alot of it blank when it could be printed on. Trying to be a conscientious worker by not wasting paper and Acrobat is not cooperating with me.

Thanks,
Erik

[_Gloria_Mc_ · Accepted solution]

Erik,
The others have (hopefully) made it clear to you that Acrobat is not a word processing or document layout program; (as Geo said) it's a document display program. If you have access to the source file from which the PDF was created, then change the margins in that file.

If no source, then -- at the risk of stating the obvious -- if you are trying to conserve paper, is the font of the document large enough that you could print two (cropped) pages of your document per physical page? That is an option for many printers. Also, printing two-sided. Just look at your printer's properties - hopefully you will find one or both of these options.

--GMc

[kimw36415508]

Hello,

I have a similar problem and have read this thread in full, but can't work out how to fix it. Can anyone help?

I have a PDF made up of multiple sections. Some sections have page margins that are too narrow; other sections have page margins that are perfect as they are. I want to increase the page margins just of certain sections, and I need to make this change in the PDF itself. All pages are A4.

I need to make these changes within the PDF itself, as this will later be printed by someone else (on A4 paper), along with lots of other PDFs. This batch printing will be done with the mode 'Print actual size' (not 'fit to scale'), to be consistent with the other PDFs.

I'm using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro.

Huge thanks to anyone who can help!

Kim

[NWTrillium]

Hello Kim,

I just came back to this forum and found that you had posted. What I have resolved to to is this. I use PowerPoint 2013 and then turn them into pdfs. The borders will change from a PP to a pdf and so I actually print up the pdf and measure all the sides by 16ths of an inch. I will make the border the same by adjusting the PP by .01 increments on all the sides to get the desired border around all the sides. After awhile I get a feel for it. Usually 1/16" + .04  I may have to print it up few times before I have got the border even on all sides. I print to actual size too since so many out there may not have the ability to select fit to page. This way it may be closer to what I am printing out. This may or may not help you but might give you clues how you may want to figure a work around.

[susannej91230390]

I totally understand your frustration with the lack of margin set up in Adobe Acrobat pdf files.  When I create a booklet in either Word or Publisher I make sure the margins are very narrow but Adobe changes them and I cannot make them print any narrower.  Why can't Acrobat just leave the margins as they are created?

[NWTrillium]

I just reread my reply and realized it had so my errors in it. I edited just now so it makes more sense : /  Yes I was floored about the whole margin issue when I discovered it. I tried publisher and word but use PP since it allows me way more flexibility when I make digital products. When I have decorative borders I use this approach. I think you will notice that when the document compresses in pdf form some things can get wonky. I don't know if it is possible to control the compression to the point where it is exactly the same, something has got to give in the process. I know my clipart doesn't hold at 300dpi when converted to pdf.

Also their viewer is not always exact compared to what prints out too. Many times things will look a little distorted on the pdf but it will print up fine. I don't think this is a priority with Adobe. I get frustrated with their approach on many things. It is what it is. 

[Dov Isaacs]

Deanne Broughton and Susanne Jones,

To be very clear, nothing in Acrobat changes the margins that you have setup in you Office documents. The entire layout is passed to Acrobat for creation of PDF (either via PDFMaker or the AdobePDF PostScript Printer Driver instance) by the Office applications and Acrobat makes no changes to what is passed to it.

With regards to clipart not holding to 300dpi, there can be two issues at play here. First, you need to be careful which joboptions you specify. The Standard joboptions do downsample raster images to 150 dpi. You should consider using the High Quality Print joboptions instead. Secondly and more importantly, just because raster images that you import into a Microsoft Office document are 300 dpi does not mean that Office maintains the full resolution. Depending upon the version of Microsoft Office you are running and the individual applications therein, images may be automatically downsampled when imported or output. Check the preferences for each of the programs. Those options are freak'in scary and can do serious output quality damage if not changed to something more reasonable!!!

I suspect that most of your issues are really with Microsoft. There is nothing that Adobe can do once the fully formatted content is passed to us by these applications!

               - Dov

[NWTrillium]

Thank you Dov.

Well from a user's point of view I just know that when I print from a PP I get one border and when I covert it to pdf I get a completely different border when I print it. In PP I do select do not compress graphics for what it is worth. I have no idea how much that helps.

I know if I try to print to adobe printer my hyperlinked images and text is lost and have to use Save to Pdf to keep the links in place. I find it odd that regular links in the same document will hold onto the link but the hyperlinked images and text don't. It seems to this user it is inconsistent from my end.

I was also having problems with the designer fonts, they weren't translating when converting to pdfs. It may be a bad hand off from MS but how is the users to know. I think I reasonably assumed that if I want to turn a document into a pdf it will look the same way and the fonts would be preserved. But with editing pdf I guess Acrobat now reads the fonts and it it doesn't align with it's list it goes BOING. Yes there are so many settings I have no idea what they all do and many times what I am doing is not what manuals address. For instance making printables with PP. 

Well I do lock my pdfs and prior to that I always check the box to print to high resolution, but not sure the dpi with the graphics have been preserved or to what degree from changing the settings in both PP and the pdf. I recently tried to check to see if there was a way to see if the graphics still held onto the 300dpi in the pdf but couldn't find anything that would show me that. Is there a way to check this?

I use PP 2013 with Win7 64 bit Ultimate. Yes the settings are scary for sure and I have had to start making notes of what they are so I can refer back to them since I keep forgetting why I am not doing this or that now since I discovered this or that doesn't work well. I know there are a lot of us doing the same thing I am but no place for us to go to get best ways on this. I get different advice from so called experts who don't really get what I am doing and then I end up back tracking and having to redo things since now I realized all too late my hyperlinks don't work with Print to Adobe. I think they can hear me screaming all the way to the east coast when I discover these things out. 

I wish MS and Adobe would be more on the same page with this stuff since users are caught in the mucky middle. I am not about to be a graphics designer but still need to do better desktop publishing with PP 2013 and Acrobat XI. Better yet I wish Siri was in my PP and Adobe and I could just tell her to figure it out and make it for me ; ) 

But since MS is not translating entirely well with Acrobat I figured out my work around with printing and measuring and adjusting the graphics to create an even boarder and it works. So yes I have PP not compressing graphics and yes I have high resolution for pdf, it doesn't help the border issue that is why the work around.

If you have any others suggestions, please share since I would like to produce the best possible pdfs for my buyers.

[Test Screen Name]

DId you check the page scaling options? If set to fit to page it will seem to enlarge the margins.

[NWTrillium]

Hi Test Screen, well if I am tracking you correctly on this, in pdf printing I set it up to print to "actual size" not to "fit" to page. I am assuming that would be a scale of 100%? Is that what you mean?

[Test Screen Name]

Y‌es, that is 100%. Printing From the PDF, not making the PDF.

[DaddySam]

You can decrease margins: Open the document in pdf & use the "Extract" Function

You can increase margins all around in a limited way: Open the document in pdf and print to pdf then change the scaling

[ahmedcoyou]

Dear guys,

I faced a similar problem, I had an eBook that had Big margins that waste a lot of space and make the print look small, I tried to use actual scale when printing it, but as the margins where not equally the same on each side, this option didn't help a lot.

I wanted something like a 'crop' for each and every 400+ pages of this unique eBook!

I found a way, drop Adobe PDF and go for Foxit Phantom PDF. It is a way better with tons of feature that basically you can do whatever you want with your PDF file, cut add or deleted specific pages, edit text, change text re-flow, exactly as you do it with MS word!!!

Also you can crop all of you pages in no time, then print the new file exactly as you wanted.

I highly recommend it to any one who want more than a simple PDF reader.

[Test Screen Name]

Did you try Acrobat? Adobe has these features, but not in the free Reader.

[uvbogden]

@Test Screen Name, MVP

I'm using Acrobat 11 and I can't find any controls for formatting either a blank page, or receiving a finshed document where the text looks like it was tossed onto the page with variable margins and distances between lines. If these can be adjusted, please tell us how.

[Test Screen Name]

Can't be except to crop the page to another size (which changes the visible margin). Acrobat is not Word.

[uvbogden]

In the olden days, there was virtually no editing available for Adobe Acrobat. At the same time, MS Word provided the entire word processing gamut of formatting and editing. A major function of Acrobat that is not available with Word is to convert webpages to PDFs, but this is not always perfect, leaving the PDF with text and pics abnormally associated or text running down the middle of the page with 2 inch margins, etc. This has improved greatly over the years, but many conversions remain very different from the original webpage. We have heard that the best way to edit PDFs is via exporting to Word, but that also is imperfect and often difficult to edit.

Adobe has vastly improved editing functions for PDFs. However, basic formatting (things like adjusting margins) functions remain missing in action. There are work-arounds, but they are time-consuming and circuitous. It is said that Acrobat is not Word; this remains true today although the differences between them have narrowed considerably. Acrobat has the advantage of converting webpages to PDFs, a function that Word does not have. Adding some basic formatting, like margins, to Acrobat's already extensive editing capabilities, would add significantly to Acrobat's advantages over Word.

[Sidney-Invention]

Helpful that it was stated .pdf is a final format, not set up for editing in major ways.  Acrobat will export, so I used that and opened in a compatible word processor.  That program had the margin changing feature.

[Rick5RD5]

With so many documents being distributed as PDFs it seems eminently reasonable that print dialog boxes -- or at least the "print to PDF" print dialog box -- would allow adjustment of even number page margins to have consistent margins on left and right pages when printing double sided. I wouldn't mind the intermediate "print to PDF" step if it accomplished the task.

[Sylvia5FA5]

I found it much easier to simply print the document, then reduce the copy size as an ad hoc margin adjustment.  I needed the margins smaller and right side greater than left to add pdf document to a 3 prong notebook.  Printing them at 95% allowed me enough margin to do that and the resolution is clear nad readable.  Good luck fellow Adobians! 🙂

[Cristina24398678rsvs]

This might help, I know late to the original question, but might help someone else seeking the same answer.

This helped re-size the PDF of a court document, which I was refiling as an exhibit, because the re-filing would add another court stamp at the top, and I wanted a space at the top so the court stamps did not overlap. (So, enlarged margins, but on a PDF I had no control or authority to edit in another program). 

Set Page Boxes (found searching for re-size), change page sizes, fixed sizes, then choose one of the default page sizes. This automatically created a larger margin and smaller image of the PDF document per page. 

This was done using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC.

[defaultl37lc3z52car]

Thank you! I have moved on from the project that question was in relation
to long ago, but your information is very valuable. Much appreciated that
you passed it on.

[defaultvgk4u376kx5z]

SO it is pretty sad that Adobe no longer allows you to set margins when printing -- you have to buy Acrobat Pro -- I am so tired of Adobe I could scream ... truly a piss poor product and business approach ... if you want to do ANYTHING with a pdf - you need to buy the full solution -- you suck Adobe!!

[laiwu]

The whole thing is pretty goofy. I'm sick of the Adobe apologists intoning: "It's an image not a Word doc." What arrogance. So what? IMAGES can be resized, too. Erik wasn't asking the text to be re-flowed. Duh.

• Weird, though, Acrobat does have a Custom Scale setting, but it disappears when I select Multiple Pages.
• Weird #2: there is a nice Margin Setting dialog under Page Setup, but the choices always seem to be greyed out, whether I'm in sigle or multiple pages. What the hey!?

Okay, I won't meet the voices of arrogance with more whining. I have a cheap workaround, Erik:

When my choice of 2pp side-by-side on landscape prints too tiny... with tons of white margin, I just trick the program into thinking I'm printing on A4 paper (the European size 0.69" longer than our 8.5x11 letter). Then, by killing most of the side margin space, the result comes out with a more readable typesize. The heck with buying add-ons, etc. 

Hope this trick helps until Adobe's programmers wise up.

[JoCK.BCC]

I had the exact same problem, document printed fine from Word with the margin parameters I had set, but whenever I went to print from the PDF using Adobe it forces a 25mm (1") border around the whole document, no matter how much you scale or fit the page, and even though the margins were set in Word (and our printer was more than capable of printing in this area). I'm sorry Abode, but your free reader is pants. I highly recommend using C u t e P D F E d i t o r as this will print exactly how you want it, directly from your browser, and it has FREE edit functions and will convert to Word, Excel, whatever else you please - for FREE. 

[Amalia30223385ed2g]

Ctrl+p-->"more settings"--> Scale(%) set to 65%--> print (printing pdf that opened in a web page).  I'm facing a similar problem.  I have a report that exports to a pdf in a web browser and it has like 0.2" columns that get cut off when printed.  I don't want to nor have time to save it and manipulate it with Adobe DC or other program.  Using the print option "fit to printable area" does nothing.  And using the "system dialog" option to reduce the "% of actual size" only partially works (bottom and right side of page are still cut off).  The only thing that worked for me is to change the scale in the web page print menu.  

[Francisco28038131ncuq]

I was printing using a photocopier (Canon iR-ADV C5860) that can hole punch, and the holes were being punched into the text.

I solved it by going into advanced printing preferences and changing the Gutter size in mm. I increased the Gutter by a couple of millimetres and it reduced the entire page anchored to the right side of the page rather than the top left.

Mind you, *everything* was reduced (text became smaller) all proportions & aspect ratio intact. Think of treating the page like an image and reducing the entire image.