A

Anonymous

Answered

How do I scale from A4 to Letter WITHOUT printing to PDF?

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
July 2, 2016
6 replies
9742 views

How do I scale from A4 (8.27”x11.69”) to Letter (8.5”x11.00”) WITHOUT printing to PDF?

I do NOT want to “print to PDF” because that greatly reduces the quality of my document and changes the colors.

I do NOT have access to the original Word document.

I am using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro.

If I try to use Document > Crop Pages > Change Page Size > Fixed Sizes > Page Sizes, I cannot select the ‘Letter’ option from the dropdown (it is greyed-out). Apparently you can only scale to a page size that is LARGER than your UNCROPPED area, which means cropping down to 8.27”x11.00” first doesn’t work.

I have googled and tried EVERY possible way of permanently deleting the cropped area (removing hidden information, running a preflight, etc.), but nothing actually works. Either the cropped area still appears in the ‘Crop Pages’ screen, or (even if I can get it to disappear from the ‘Crop Pages’ screen) the text under the preview still reads “Cropped page size: 8.268”x11.000”, which means the ‘Letter’ option in the dropdown is still greyed-out.

Please help!!

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Karl Heinz Kremer

The preflight fixup that was mentioned before was introduced after Acrobat 9, so with your version of Acrobat, you cannot use it. In my experience, going from A4 to letter (or vice versa), in most cases, the content does not have to be scaled, and you an get away with just resizing the page content. As you found out, resizing via the crop dialog only works if you are trying to end up with a larger page size, but going from A4 to letter will make one dimensions of your page smaller, and the other one larger. Because of that, Acrobat does not allow you to do this in one step. What you can do is make your page size larger so that it is the width of a letter sized page, and the height of an A4 sized page, and then in a second step crop out just the letter sized content by taking off 0.347" from top and bottom.

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Such a good answer!

You can bypass Acrobat's cropping limitation by using the Resize Pages feature of my free abracadabraTools:

http://abracadabrapdf.net/utilities-in-english/acrobat-utilities/abracadabratools_en/

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

Karl Heinz Kremer

Correct answer

Community Expert

The preflight fixup that was mentioned before was introduced after Acrobat 9, so with your version of Acrobat, you cannot use it. In my experience, going from A4 to letter (or vice versa), in most cases, the content does not have to be scaled, and you an get away with just resizing the page content. As you found out, resizing via the crop dialog only works if you are trying to end up with a larger page size, but going from A4 to letter will make one dimensions of your page smaller, and the other one larger. Because of that, Acrobat does not allow you to do this in one step. What you can do is make your page size larger so that it is the width of a letter sized page, and the height of an A4 sized page, and then in a second step crop out just the letter sized content by taking off 0.347" from top and bottom.

A

Anonymous

This worked!!! Thank you so much Karl!

try67

Community Expert

I've developed a tool that can scale PDF pages to any size. If you want to test it out before purchasing it feel free to contact me privately. The tool can be found here: Custom-made Adobe Scripts: Acrobat -- Scale PDF Pages

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Hi.

The real question is : why ?

Since a PDF can fit any screen and can fit any page size when printed.

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

A

Anonymous

These documents are going to be included in an electronic Common Technical Document (eCTD) pharmaceutical marketing application submission to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and FDA's PDF technical specification guidance says all documents in an eCTD submission must be 8.5"x11". So to answer your question of "why?"... because it is required by my regional regulatory health authority. If I don't scale these documents, my client's application could be rejected (my client is based in Korea). And that would be a $2,374,200 mistake...

Dov Isaacs

Legend

You are certainly correct that “printing to PDF” is not the approach to take here. And unfortunately, the Crop Pages tool doesn't scale pages, it only changes the page size.

As Bernd Alheit advises, the ability to actually scale pages can be found in the Preflight Tool and more specifically in the Preflight Tool of Acrobat DC. In Preflight, you go the Single Fixups panel (the one with the wrench and under pages, select the Scale pages to specified size single fixup. You can use this as-is if you convert 8.5" and 11" to their respective millimeter values, 215.9 and 279.4. A safer route would be to create a new fixup (options=>copy) in which the units are inches as opposed to millimeters.

I am not sure if this function exists in the same manner or if it exists at all in earlier versions of Acrobat.

- Dov

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

In Adobe Acrobat DC Pro you can use the Preflight Tool for this.

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