Changing Print Setting for A4 Paper

[cameol8779899]

Good afternoon,

My team recently translated a number of manuals to Spanish. These manuals will be used in Europe and South America. They will be delivered in PDF format and printed.

Because the manuals were originally created in English for use in the United States, the paper size of the FrameMaker book is set to "Letter." Could anyone walk me through the steps required in order to prepare these manuals for distribution in Europe and South America? I don't want to assume that it's as simple as File > Print Setup > Paper Size: A4 > OK and then a book update.

Thank you,

Cameo

[LinSims · Accepted solution]

You're right, it isn't that simple, but it actually isn't all that hard, either.

What you have to do is set up new master pages that use the A4 page size definition for each of your page layouts. When you want to output to A4, apply those master pages and let Frame take care of the rest. Once your layouts are updated, you'll need to regenerate your documents to recreate the TOC, Index, and xrefs and then output to PDF, making sure that your printer definitions are set to A4 paper size.

What you might want to do is create and maintain two separate template files, one for US-standard documents and one for A4-standard documents. Keep the NAMES of the master pages and the tags the same for each template, but adjust the page size and frame on the A4 master pages to A4 sizes. You may want to adjust the parameters in the A4 tags as well for aesthetics, but it's not strictly necessary.

[LinSims]

I forgot to mention the quick and dirty route, which is to set up the frames on all your master pages so that they will fit on an A4-sized piece of paper. If you do that, then you can, as you said, just use the print setup to specify either US-letter-size or A4-size paper. The downside of this is that the US-letter-size manual will have extra-wide margins on all four sides. Not the choice I'd make, but it's an option.