Problem Changing Page Size In A Large Document

[jerryn37838804]

I am not a total newbie to InDesign or several other Adobe products. I have completed the Adobe sponsored tutorials in both InDesign and Photoshop (working on another one). However I am having and issue with changing the size of all the pages in an InDesign document. This is a family cookbook shared by many family members. The document in question is formatted for ½ page layout (4 ¼” by 5 ½”). I want to reformat them to 5” by 8”.

I have tried the File->Document Setup->Adjust Layout method. It did change the size of the page, but it shrunk the width of my text and picture boxes (these are the only ones I have in the document). The change in height did not seem to bother my elements. All the other methods appeared to be variations of the same Adjust Layout method

I found one here talking about using a Liquid Layout method. When I try to do this when I select Layout->Liquid Layout the panel that comes up does not have anything about deselecting page and select master text frames.  Can you give me some more direction on this method. My ideal solution would be one where I do not have to change every text box I have manually (approximately 300+ pages with the same basic look as what is in Figure 3

 Figure 1 : The box that comes up after selecting Liquid Layout.

Figure 2:  The box that comes up after selecting Adjust Layout.

 Figure 3:  A page with my original layout settings

Figure 4: The same page after I change the page size. This is what I get no matter the method I choose to change the page size.

[Scott Falkner]

It looks like you don’t have any margins on your pages. Is that deliberate? Or perhaps you have captured only the text portion of the page. what is the text area of the original (4½″ × 5½″) and the resized (5″ × 8″) documents? This is the most important measurement. I also suggest you would be better off without using tables. Tabs and spanned/split columns are easier to make global changes to if you use paragraph styles. If you are willing to share the file someone can examine it to see what, if anything, is the problem.

[jerryn37838804]

There are margins on the page.If you look at the botton of figure 3 there is a purple line (just above the page number), that is the margin line. I have crowded many text boxes tight to the left and right margin because of trying to squeeze as much content on the page as I can.

The margins as set in the current document: Left: 0.25,  Right: 0.25, Top: 0.25, Bottom: 0.42. If you are wondering why the bottom margin is different from the others, I am not sure I can really anwer that. The original document was built about 3 years ago. I think it may have to do with allowing proper room for the page numbers, but I am not sure.

As for sharing the document my only concern would be size, the total size is just under 30MB. The cookbook was built as a Book with each contributer getting their own section. What I have done is copied the smallest section and attach it to this message. Note that the document attached is an InDesign Document.

Your help is greatly appreciated

Jerry

p.s This whole cook book thing has turned into a monster. I originally built two "family" cookbooks, one for my wifes side of the family, and one for my side.  Both sides now want and updated cook book. They want me to add a huge number of recipies, change the format to 5 x 8 so they can print it out in cardstock, and make an astronomical number of edits to the existing recipes.  I have told them not to expect an updated cookbook anytime in the near future.

[Peter Spier]

I took a very fast look at yor sample file. It is not 4.25 by 5.5 as you stated, which would have made the new size larger, but 5.5 x 8.5 which means you are going to a smaller page size. Reducing the page size without changing the margins means the usable page area is shrinking, and since you have no space to reduce the margin widths you are stuck with having narriower text frames which is leading to overset text. There is no way around making the frames smaller when you reduce the page area.

On the good news front, you seem to have set up styles in the document. You can try editing the styles to reduce the type size slightly to see if the text will reflow and fit in the smaller frames, but that's probably not ideal.

As Scott has sort of mentioned, your layout method -- individual text frames for each heading, ingredient list and procedure -- is the real problem here. I have no particular problem with the tables, though I agree tabbed text is easier to work with. A single frame per page, set to the full size of the printable area between the margins, would allow the text to reflow through the whole page at once. Use paragraph spacing rules to distribute space between sections of the recipe, and Keep Options in your paragraph styles to keep recipes from breaking across pages in the cases where there is not enough space for two recipes to fit on a single page (or, since your family wants to print these on cards, to make each recipe start on a new page, regarless of what might fit).

Of course doing that essentially means starting over, but it also would be an excellent time to change to a landscape orientation to make the cards easier to read in the file box.