Resize PDF pages onto one standard paper size

A document assembled from several sources usually is not one size: an A4 report, a US Letter appendix somebody emailed, and a certificate that arrived as A5. This puts every page onto the sheet you choose. Each source page is sealed into a box with its own resources and drawn once onto the new sheet, so nothing inside it has to be understood or re-encoded — the type stays sharp and the photographs are the same bytes. The pages are redrawn, though, which means comments, links and form fields do not survive.

Comments, links and form fields are not carried over. Every page is drawn afresh at the new size and those objects, which sit beside the content rather than inside it, have nowhere to land — the result says so when your file had any. Flatten a form first if the values matter.

Resize the pages

No account. Your upload is deleted after 2 hours, the result after 24 hours.

How it works

  1. Choose the sheet. A4, A3, A5, Letter or Legal. Pick the paper that is actually in the tray at the other end: A4 in most of the world, Letter in North America.
  2. Decide about orientation and scaling. ‘Keep each page’s own’ gives a wide page a wide sheet, which is what a mixed document usually wants. Fit keeps the proportions and may leave a band of white; stretch fills the sheet and distorts anything that is not the same shape as it.
  3. Print a page before you print two hundred. Fitting a Letter page onto A4 shrinks it slightly and centres it, so anything close to the edge moves inwards. One test print tells you whether the margins are acceptable.

What the options do

The form above lists the options this tool is running today, straight from the server. This is what they are for.

Paper size
The sheet everything ends up on. A4 is 210 × 297 mm, Letter is 216 × 279 — nearly the same, differing by about 6 mm one way and 18 the other, which is exactly why a Letter document printed on A4 loses the bottom of the page and an A4 document printed on Letter loses the right edge. Choosing the right one here is the fix. A3 doubles A4 and A5 halves it, so scaling between the A sizes is proportional and leaves no margin at all when the source is A-series.
Orientation
‘Keep each page’s own’ decides page by page: a page wider than it is tall gets a landscape sheet, everything else gets portrait. That is nearly always right, and it is what stops a landscape spreadsheet in the middle of a portrait report being squashed to a quarter of its size. Forcing portrait or landscape is for the case where the whole document has to go into a binder one way round — and it will shrink any page of the opposite shape considerably, because it has to fit the short side.
How to scale
Fitting scales the page until it just fits inside the sheet, keeps its proportions and centres it, which is why an A4 page fitted onto Letter has a white band at the sides. Stretching scales the two axes independently so the page fills the sheet exactly, with no border and no white — and with everything distorted by the difference between the two shapes. Between A4 and Letter that stretch is about 3% one way and 6% the other, which is visible in a circular logo and invisible in body text. Fit unless you have a reason.

What this tool does not do

  • Comments, links and form fields are not carried over. Every page is drawn afresh at the new size and those objects, which sit beside the content rather than inside it, have nowhere to land — the result says so when your file had any. Flatten a form first if the values matter.
  • Every page goes onto the chosen sheet. There is no way to resize some pages and leave the rest, and no per-page size.
  • Fitting centres the page and gives you an even margin. There is no control for shifting the content to allow for a binding edge, and no percentage scale — the numbers are worked out from the two paper sizes.
  • Making a page bigger does not add detail. An A5 page blown up to A3 has the same photographs at a quarter of the effective resolution; the text stays crisp only because it is drawn from outlines rather than pixels.
  • It is not a way to reduce file size. The sheet changes, the images inside it do not — compress is the tool that re-encodes them.
  • It does not trim anything. Resize scales the whole page onto the sheet; crop is what takes a margin off.

What happens to your file

The file is uploaded because Resize PDF pages runs on our server rather than in the browser tab. It is kept for at most 2 hours and the result you download for 24 hours, then a scheduled job deletes both — a job has to be able to read the file while it runs, and you have to be able to retry a failed conversion without re-uploading. Neither needs longer.

Nothing about the contents is logged, and no one reads your documents. The retention page lists the same numbers the code enforces, and the privacy policy says who can reach the storage they sit in.

Questions

My document mixes A4 and Letter and prints badly. What do I set?
Choose the paper that is in the printer, keep each page’s own orientation, and fit rather than stretch. Every page then arrives on one sheet size with its proportions intact, which is what stops the tray-mismatch prompt and the clipped edges.
Fit or stretch?
Fit for anything anyone will read: it keeps the shapes right and pays for it with a margin. Stretch only when the page must fill the sheet edge to edge and a few per cent of distortion does not matter — a background, a texture, artwork with no circles or type in it.
Will resizing blur the text?
No. Text in a PDF is drawn from font outlines, so it is redrawn at the new size rather than scaled as pixels, and it is exactly as sharp as it was. Photographs are a different matter: scaling up spreads the same pixels over more paper.
Will my fillable form still work afterwards?
No. Form fields are lost because the pages are redrawn — you get a picture-perfect but inert page. If you need the answers to survive, flatten the form first, which turns the values into ordinary page content, and then resize.
Can I change the page size without scaling what is on it?
Not here. This scales the content to match the new sheet. Putting a smaller page onto a bigger sheet with the content left at its original size is a different operation, and the closest thing available is to crop, which changes the visible page size without touching the content at all.