Indesign A4 Exports to Letter sized PDF

[miam20668303]

I have an Indesign document which shows A4 Page Size in the Document Setup.  When I export to PDF, it exports to Letter size.  How do I get it to export to A4 page size?

[BobLevine]

That is highly unusual. The only way I can think of that happening is by printing to PDF.

What version of InDesign? What operating system?

What are your export settings and how are you determining that the exported PDF is letter size?

[miam20668303]

Hi Bob

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.  Yes, it's really strange because I was using the method described by Bill Silbert (comment below) File>Export>Adobe PDF and yet it was still exporting to letter size.  Fortunately it was a simple document, so I ended up cutting and pasting all of the elements into a completely new Indesign document - making sure it was set for A4 - and it exported to an A4 PDF perfectly.  The only explanation I can think of was that I inherited the file from a school colleague who'd created it in a previous version of Indesign so perhaps something was lost in translation.  Thank you for your help as well Abambo​.

[Bill Silbert · Accepted solution]

If you are making your pdfs in the recommended way of File>Export>Adobe PDF then it is actually not possible to change the resulting page size from that which has been established in the InDesign Document Setup. See screen shot:

[Abambo]

As BobLevine​ and Bill Silbert​ pointed out, it is not possible for an export to have a different page size then the designed page size, what ever size this is. The only way you can have this is by printing to a PDF printer and the printers default page is Letter

My example is an A5 printing as A4!

The recommended export option does not at all have a page size option! Even if you have different page sizes in your design, each page size exports according to its design size (+ eventually bleed and other elements you may have configured).

[vinny38]

Hi

Please note that Document Setup does not necessarily reflects the actual size of your pages (they can also have different sizes).

The Document Setup size is the size by default, but you can change the size of a or several page(s), or even Master pages, using the Page tool, or directly from the Page panel. (See example below:)

The only explanation I can think of was that I inherited the file from a school colleague

My guess is that your colleague did change page size somehow and you got confused with the Document Setup infos.

You can check this using a Preflight profile that is set as "Document > All pages must use same size and orientation". Since default page [none] does keep default Document Setting size, Preflight should throw an error.

Finally, if you want to re-apply A4 size to your Letter Pages, you could use the Liquid Layout feature (see: Liquid and alternate layouts in InDesign )

Hope that helps

Vinny

[Bill Silbert]

Which is why making a global change to a document's size should always be done through the document setup and not the page tool. It all makes sense now!