How to resize a PDF
- Drop your PDF. Mixed page sizes are fine; they all come out matching.
- Choose the target. A standard paper size, or a percentage if you just want everything bigger or smaller.
- Click Resize, then Download. Pages are scaled to fit and centred.
The A4 and Letter problem
A4 is 8.27 by 11.69 inches. US Letter is 8.5 by 11. They look interchangeable, and the difference is enough that printers crop the bottom of one and leave a gap on the other. Anyone sending documents across the Atlantic meets this eventually, usually at the moment a signature line disappears off the foot of a page.
Rather than stretching pages to the new proportions, which distorts every letterform, this scales each page as far as it will go and centres it. A narrow margin appears on two edges, and nothing is cut or squashed.
Scaling for other reasons
The percentage mode is the one to reach for when a document needs to become physically smaller or larger rather than a named size: shrinking a poster to a handout, or scaling a pattern to print at true size. If what you actually want is several pages on one sheet, that is n-up layout, and if you want the file to weigh less, that is compression.
Why not just let the print dialog scale it?
"Fit to page" in the print dialog solves the problem once, on your printer, for you. It does nothing for the file itself, so the mismatch travels with the document: the recipient who prints with scaling off gets the cropped signature line, and the print shop gets a file they have to adjust by hand. Resizing bakes the fix in. The PDF that leaves here is Letter, or A4, or A5, on every machine that ever opens it, with no settings to remember and nobody downstream to brief.
It also settles the mixed-size document, a real hazard when pages have been merged from different sources: an A4 report, a Letter appendix, a receipt scanned at whatever size the phone app felt like. Printers handle a document that changes paper size mid-stream badly, and duplexing handles it worse. One pass here and every page matches.
Common uses for resizing PDF pages
- Convert A4 to Letter: stop US printers cropping the foot of a European document.
- Convert Letter to A4: the same fix in reverse for documents sent from the States.
- Normalise a merged file: bring pages from several sources to one consistent size.
- Scale a poster to a handout: shrink an oversized design to something you can print at a desk.
Frequently asked questions
How do I change the page size of a PDF?
Drop the file, pick the size you want from the list, and click Resize. Every page is rebuilt at that size with the content scaled to fit.
How do I convert A4 to Letter, or Letter to A4?
Choose the destination size from the same list. The two are close but not identical: A4 is narrower and taller, so pages moving between them are scaled to fit and centred, which leaves a slim band on two edges rather than cutting anything off.
Will my text go blurry?
It will not. Text and vector artwork are drawn from instructions rather than pixels, so they re-render sharp at any size. Photographs already in the file are scaled the way any image is, so blowing a page up a long way will soften them.
Can I shrink a PDF's file size with this?
Different job. Scaling changes the page dimensions, not the weight of what's inside. To make the file smaller, use compress, which has exact targets like under 200 KB.
Is my document uploaded?
No. Your browser rebuilds the document, so nothing is sent to a server.