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• • February 19, 2010 at 11:41 am #54933
    Jeremy G

    Member

    Hi everyone,

    I'm the desingner at a church. We've created a custom Bible Study curriculum for which I designed a Learner Guide. It’s got worksheet pages & fill-in-the-blanks galore. We were going to have this printed as an 8.5×11 perfect bound book. Did all the design & layout based on standard letter size. Well it turns out that our online vendor neglected to mention that their 8.5×11 book is, in reality, a 8.25×10.75 book. Of course everything on my end (margins, type size, graphic elements, etc.) is made to fit nicely on the actual 8.5×11. Is there a fairly easy, practical, functional way to proportionally scale my entire ID document to fit the correct page size???

    Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!

  • February 19, 2010 at 1:25 pm #54934
    Theunis De Jong

    Member

    Three viable solutions:

    1. Don't do anything. You heard it right! Ask the printer to magnify/reduce your PDF to the correct size (you can try out a few percentages on a good photocopier).

    2. Export your current doc to a PDF. Make a new ID document of the correct size. Import the entire PDF and place them at the correct size. Don't worry, no manual labour involved, there are Javascripts out there that make it a fairly painless process. Downside is if you alter something in your original text, you will have to re-create the PDF and update the image document.

    3. Make a new ID document of the correct size. Import and place the original ID document into this (there are scripts for that as well). Works almost the same as (2) above, but in this case, editing is a snap. Just use “Edit original” on the image of an ID page and ID will open the original document into its own application — InDesign itself.

    Am I missing something? I don't think so — adjusting layout is possible with the document you have right now, but you have to scale the text frames “manually”. If you just resize them, the text will run radically different; and ID is just too good with typesetting to assume “if I reduce the frame by 10% and I make the text 10% smaller, it'll be the same” — it won't.

  • February 19, 2010 at 3:58 pm #54936
    Jeremy G

    Member

    Thanks for the suggestions Jongware!

    On #1 – I wasn't really sure if I trusted them to do the scaling/adjusting on an 88 page book. Who knows what I would end up with. I guess I just have control issues.

    Thought about #2 before I posted the question. Didn't like the idea of having to make changes & make another PDF (as you also mentioned). Too many steps.

    I actually ended up doing what you mentioned in the last part of your post – scaling the text frames manually. Although quite time consuming, this gave me the most control of all my page elements throughout the document. I was very surprised and rather impressed at InDesign's ability to see each text box as a single unit & scale accordingly even though there was text flowing from box to box on each page.

    BUT, what I am very interested in, now that you mentioned it, is #3. How do I get ID to place another ID file & place the imported pages onto my new document pages all in one command. When I make my box in my new doc & place the original file, it just drops in the first page like a graphic & stops. How do I work the magic of putting the complete original file into a new document all at once. And can I have it scale the original pages to fit the new page size when I place it? Now I'm very curious as to how #3 would work.

    Thanks!

  • February 19, 2010 at 6:26 pm #54938
    Colin Flashman

    Member

    I think the script Jongware is talking about in point 3 is “multipageimporter2.2.1.jsx” which can be downloaded from this link: https://creativepro.com…..r2.2.1.zip. This is one of the more commonly used scripts that i use as a prepress operator.

    The script allows a multi-page PDF OR INDD to be imported into an INDD but treats the placement as graphics, so its not possible to use any of the editing features in indesign to edit the graphic directly in that file, edits have to be done in the original indesign file.

    I don't think its possible to do what's being asked in the last para of your post (scale original pages to fit the new page size and still have all editable/controllable objects in indesign) BUT i'm not very good at javascript. Perhaps try https://www.adobeforums.com and then search Indesign, then Indesign Scripting.

    The solutions offered by Jongware are the same suggestions that i'd offer you, particularly the first one: let the printer do it. Any printer worth their salt has a piece of software called a RIP (Raster Image Processor) which controls the output of the file, and in the RIP its possible to control the layout imposition, ink trapping, page size, scale, orientation, etc. The RIP my work uses (AGFA Apogee) lets an operator select all the pages in the run-list at once and scale them to 97% proportionally and center the pages.

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