Resize document with everything in it eg font size, leading, etc

[seeminglee_sml]

I’d like to know if there’s an easy way to scale up / down a document while automatically changing all the Paragraph Styles to match.

I basically want to achieve the effect as if I have placed an Indesign document into another InDesign document, but to do this natively within the doc. Another way to think about it would be how resizing an image would work in Photoshop — everything is resized.

I’m gonna assume that this is likely not possible natively (why not - adobe?) So I’m posting this question here hoping that someone would know a script that might do this. 

We need better ways to find InDesign scripts — please let me know also if you know of some type of index somewhere. Thanks!

Important notes: (here added because of comments below)

Please do not suggest to place an InDesign doc inside another InDesign doc, or output the PDF. The point of all this is not about the workarounds, nor is it about how to output a doc in a specific size. I am interested in the INPUT — ie. the source doc. I just would like to scale the doucment at a source document level. What most of the answers suggest are purely about output. I’m not interested in that.

I understand that you may make assumption that I’m interested in the output and that I shouldn’t have any reasons to scale up/down the document, but it’s mostly a matter of “head space”. This is really hard to explain but let’s just say that I prefer working with type size at 72pt instead of 144pt. Is it strange to want to work like that? Is it unecesasry? You can say that but I would also like to see if it’s possible. It’s not the end of the day if I couldn’t achieve what I wanted.

Further notes:

I would love to find a script that could auto-update paragraph styles if it detects that the document contains updated styles that could be redefined. I feel that this should do what I needed. Before starting to go about writing such script, I want to check that there isn’t such script already available.

[Michael Bullo]

Choose Adjust Layout from the File menu. Change the Page Size and don't forget to tick the Adjust Font Size option. Does that do what you want?

[seeminglee_sml]

This works to a degree but the result is not perfect. It also ignores headers if they are not within the main text, and it ignores master pages margins. Instead treating the “document setup” options as what it would derive from.

I just tried it on an existing doc and it doesn’t do it correctly at all. Possibly hard to explain without screenshots but I would have to make a fresh doc for you to see as I can’t post the docs I’m working on (ha). 

I have somewhat considered writing a script for this but I just thought that this MUST have been done already, right?!?!

[Michael Bullo]

Are you familiar with the Liquid Layout options? The panel is found under the Layout menu and you also want to be using the Page Tool.

[seeminglee_sml]

I am familiar with Liquid Layout — though what I need is not Liquid Layout, which is intended for something similar to responsive design.

What I need to do is fairly simple and straight-forward. I have made a bunch of designs at 4k (3840px by 3840px to be precise). I just want to get a file that’s in 1920x1920 insteaad. Realistically they are practically the same thing, but it helps keeps the font size more “predictable” — idk about you but for example, years of working in design gives me a good idea of how large a 72pt type is in proportion to the rest of the regular pages. Right now for these docs, that would be approximately 144pt (doubled), so I just wonder if there’s a way to downsize the docs to setup some expectations — even though for all intended purposes, since everything is in vector, it made no difference whatsoever.

This is something extremely trivial to do in Photoshop + Illustrator. I suppose that I could also just go select everything (select all) and size them down 50%, then use the override style option to replace all the settings. (that bit IS a good tip)

But… I imagined that there _must_ be someone who has created a script for this — even if to redefine all styles?

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This is something extremely trivial to do in Photoshop + Illustrator.

To be fair, layouts in those apps are inherently single page and graphical in nature, with text handled as little more than a graphics primitive. There are added complexities for multipage, flowing-text layouts with components outside those found on a simple "artboard."

[seeminglee_sml]

Yeah I get that. I guess they don’t see a relevant use case for me. BUT how about this use case:

Automatically update all paragraphs styles to what’s redefined in the docs. If there is a conflict, use first instance of the redefinition.

This to me would be highly generalized into something that would have reach beyond my current use case. That’s why I also think that there HAS to be a script that does that… and if not I guess it’s time for me to go read the 1000-page PDF for InDesign to research again. How I wish that InDesign has Python support instead of JS… ha

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I don't think it's an oversight of any kind, but more something that, in ID, falls outside any kind of one-command, automated need. To scale a single graphics layout (PS or AI) is both an inherent need and function. But, for good or bad, to completely change the size of a multipage text document is seen as a layout issue, and meant to be accomplished along the same lines as an initial layout.

[Michael Bullo]

The method I suggested above does work with text but it creates an override on Paragraph Styles. Overrides are identified by a "+" sign next to a style within the Paragraph Styles panel. If you right mouse click on such a style you can choose the option Redefine Style.

[seeminglee_sml]

Noted — this is a good tip. I’m sure that if the adjust layout actually worked then it would be perfect. I will definitely keep this in mind.

[Peter Spier]

If all you want to do is scale a finished document, one easy method is to place the pages into a new file of the correct size.

You can use the script at https://github.com/mike-edel/ID-MultiPageImporter/releases (originally written by Scott Zanelli and now curated by Mike Edel) to do this. It has positioning and scale options.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

There's also the very simple option of printing (or exporting) to a scaled output. But I can see the need to rescale an original/master doc directly, too.

[Peter Spier]

InDesign's print dialog presents scaling options, but for the life of me I've never found a way to export a scaled file. If you know something I don't I'd love to be educated.

[Scott Falkner]

You can print to a PostScript file then use Acrobat Distiller to convert to a PDF.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

You can't, directly from ID. I was thinking of other workflows; excuse the irrelevant suggestion, here. 🙂

[seeminglee_sml]

This solves an output issue, but not an input issue. Obviously you can place docs inside docs. The key is editability natively.

Separately (off-topic), this is a nice and useful script and I would definitely use it for something else.

[m1b]

Hi @seeminglee_sml, I'll chime in from a scripting perspective. This is going to be hard I think. I wrote a quick script that makes a start and it quickly runs into some serious challenges. For example, I can scale the pages and the items on the pages—that seems to work okay—but when you transform a text frame is seems to scale the entire story; so if you have a thread with two text frames, the text gets scaled twice. There are ways around this, but it all adds considerable time and effort to the project. Or it probably wouldn't be an issue if there were no threaded text frames. Depends on specifics of your document(s).

Also, in general, this is the type of challenge that is prone to break in many edge cases, so would require a lot of testing.

- Mark

[seeminglee_sml]

Thank you. What about a script to go through all the paragraph styles that got redefined and update the paragraph style definition automatically. This to me seems like a script with significantly more use cases, and I could possibly just perform a simple select-all + scale to get what I need.

[Robert Tkaczyk]

Why are you insisting on editability? 

You either need smaller / bigger end result of EXACTLY the same layout - or completely new layout. 

Why can't you just edit original and export smaller / bigger version? 

If you scale things up / down - you'll need to check all texts again as you'll have reflows. 

You are mentioning 4K and FHD resolutions - are those slides or what? 

What exactly are you working on and why do you need smaller / larger versions? 

Anything - as long as it doesn't need A.I. - is doable 😉 

[Robert Tkaczyk]

Don't scale - resize. 

And I have a crazy feeling, that it should be much easier to modify IDML 😉 

[Willi Adelberger]

Place an INDD in a larger INDD file. 

[Peter Spier]

That was suggested three days ago...

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

...and it's just an inversion of print-to-scale, really.

There are several paths to the end goal, but no good ones that actually resize the doc in native form.

[Peter Spier]

Back to the previous discussion of exporting scaled PDF....

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Not sure what you mean to add here. You can print to a scaled output. You can also print to a scaled PDF output (which is what I was thinking in the above comments) although it's not a good option and you can't actually export to PDF with scaling.

If the goal is a print or PDF doc of X scale, it's relatively easy to do in the output step. If the goal, for some reason, is a doc of that scale, placing a PDF or INDD will do the same thing. The only option on the list that's difficult is scaling the actual document within ID, without doing it manually and more or less hand-correcting every element.

But, given that any scale output is a few clicks away, I can't really see any need to natively rescale a working doc.