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Convert US Letter to A4 ?

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    • #54231
      Rogier
      Member

      I'm outputting a lot of PDFs for an international market, most of which are intended for print. On some of the pages the content is arranged symmetrically in the sense that, if one were to fold the paper twice, all the content would neatly be divided into four.

      As such, I'm concerned with A4 and US Letter paper sizes, and I wondering two things:

      1) Is there are relatively painless way to modify the page size of a document? For example, if I have a 20 page US Letter-size InDesign file containing text and graphics, can I modify the page size to A4? Obviously stuff would be a out of whack. But I'm wondering if there is a way to do this, so that all the content stays within the document, and then will be have to be moved and nudged into place… Or is the only way to achieve such an A4 version to start from scratch?

      2) Is there a way or method or tool to get some grasp on A4 / US Letter printing? So that I can get a tangible sense of printing A4 on a US Letter printer and vice-versa? Will printers just conform the content to their default paper size? Or does this depend on the printer?

      Is there some known “in between” document size that will output fairly well to both A4 and US Letter printers?

      In short, I'm looking for a way to avoid the scenario wherein I have to create two separate documents, one A4 and one US Letter size.

      I realize I'm asking a lot, and I'm happy to purchase a plugin or a script or insight, but I'm not sure where to go…

    • #54235

      These page sizes are entirely different. You can experiment with margin settings that ought to work for both documents (although in both cases you will have a lot of white space at either top/bottom or left/right) by creating a document that has got the width of US Letter and the height of A4: 8.5 inch wide, 29.7 mm high. Draw rectangles on your master page(s) with each of these formats (put them on a non-printing layer) and try to stay within a reasonable distance of all four sides.

      Although you can change the 'actual' page size after you worked on your document, it may not even be necessary. You can't (easily?) change the page size while exporting to PDF, but I think it's possible to target a paper size when printing.

      The only other option is to design for one size and then put yourself at the mercy of Layout Adjustment when changing to the other size.

    • #54238
      Rogier
      Member

      Thank you for your response. I will give this a try.

    • #54246
      David Blatner
      Keymaster

      Good ideas. But if you do need to convert a doc from A4 to Letter (or vice versa), turning on Layout Adjustment (in Layout menu) is the best way to do this.

    • #54248
      Anonymous
      Inactive

      Always a good idea to turn off Layout Adjustment once you've finished adjusting the layout.

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