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.

[Peter Spier]

Just meant we're circling back to ground already covered.

And I would agree with all you said, including printing to PDF being poor practice since it loses all support for advanced techniques like transparency.

About the only reason I can think of to change the page size just to get a larger or smaller version of essentially the same file is when you need different aspect ratios. I have a clinet who does brochures for boththe US and European markets, and I do two layouts for them to avoid uneven image scaling while maintianing even margins. It also means we have to watch the text flow since text frames take on slightly different shapes, too.

[Marc Autret]

Hi @seeminglee_sml 

TotalRescale does not exactly answers your question but the script provides some ideas that may help.

Best,

Marc

[m1b]

Fascinating technique and article, Marc!

[seeminglee_sml]

This is great. Thank you — I will check it out!

[TᴀW · Accepted solution]

My (not free) QuickResize script does exactly what you need: it scales an entire InDesign document and everything in it to whatever size or percentage needed. (It intentionally emulates the old Photoshop resize dialog.)

Obviously, if the resizing is not proportional, things will get squished.

If the resizing is proportional, the result is usually flawless.

Paragraph styles will get the + thing to show they're overriden, though.

There's a demo as well, so try it out: QuickResize - Id-Extras.com

[seeminglee_sml]

This is great — thanks for posting an answer that actually will work. I’ll check out a demo and decide if I will buy it.