PDF Places in InDesign Smaller Than Expected

David F. wrote:

I was experimenting with putting a PDF into InDesign and I noticed a peculiarity. While the PDF size is 8.5 x 11, that?s not what gets placed in InDesign. The size is a bit smaller.

This is a case for “Super Import Options Man!”

In this situation, the PDF you’re importing isn’t getting shrunk on the InDesign page. Instead, InDesign is using the wrong cropping rectangle. If you turn on the Show Import Options checkbox in the Place dialog box, you can tell InDesign what cropping rectangle to use. By default, it’s Bounding Box, which is usually the smallest rectangle that will fit all the artwork on the page.

However, if you change the Crop To popup menu to Media, you’ll get the whole PDF page. (Media means “the paper size of the PDF.”) That’s probably what you want. Fortunately, this setting is “sticky,” so InDesign should remember it the next time you need to import a PDF file.

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This article was last modified on December 18, 2021

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