Resize a PDF to a Different Paper Size
The architect sends a 24 x 36 plan set and the only printer on the job takes 11 x 17. Every free resizer will squeeze it down for you. Not one of them will mention that 24 x 36 onto 11 x 17 is 45.8 percent, that 45.8 percent is not half size, and that the scale rule in your pocket therefore cannot read one dimension on the print you just made. This measures every page, tells you what each reduction is actually worth before you commit, shows you page one on the sheet it will really come out on, and then resizes. Hand it a whole folder and it does all of them at once.
How it works
- Choose the PDF, or drop a whole folder of them, up to twenty at once. They are opened on this device and never uploaded.
- Every page is measured, not just the first, and each size found in the file is listed. Pick the sheet you actually have paper for, which way round it goes, and whether the printer needs a margin.
- Read the verdict beside each size before you commit. Exactly half and exactly quarter are the only reductions a scale rule can read; everything else is flagged as a print nobody can measure. Then resize and download. One file comes back as a file, a folder comes back as one zip with the same names inside.
What you get
- Measures every page in the file, so a permit set that is part plan sheet and part letter size is listed as both
- Fourteen sheets to pick from: the office sizes, and the full ANSI and ARCH plan series, not just A4 and letter
- Gives the scale of every reduction as a percentage, and says in plain words whether a scale rule can read it
- Tells you when a printer margin is the only thing standing between you and an exact half size
- A preview of page one on the sheet it will really come out on, at the size it will really come out
- Keeps fillable form fields, links and bookmarks, because the pages are changed inside the file instead of copied into a new one
- Handles pages that are stored sideways, which is where most resizers push the drawing off the edge of the paper
- Takes a whole folder, up to twenty files at once, and hands them back as one zip with the same names inside
The plan set is 24 x 36 and the printer holds 11 x 17
This is the most ordinary print job in the trade and it goes wrong quietly. The architect issues a set at full size. The office has a desktop printer that takes 11 x 17 at best and letter most days. The superintendent wants a copy in the truck, the estimator wants one to mark up, the building department wants the application at letter size, and the plotter at the print shop is a twenty minute drive and forty dollars away.
So somebody opens the file, hits print, and picks fit to page. The paper comes out and it looks right. What is not on it anywhere is the number that matters: what the drawing was reduced to. The print carries a title block that still says one quarter inch equals one foot, and that statement is now false, and nothing on the sheet says so.
Two weeks later somebody puts a scale rule on it to check a wall that has no dimension written beside it. The rule reads a number. The number is wrong, and it is wrong by a believable amount rather than an obvious one, which is the dangerous kind. Nobody catches it until the steel is short or the opening does not line up.
That is the whole reason this page exists. Resizing a PDF is a small piece of arithmetic. Knowing whether the thing you just printed can be measured is not, and it is the part every other free tool leaves out.
Half size is a number, and almost nothing is half size
An architect's scale rule works at half size without any arithmetic, and that is the only reason half size is worth anything. Every scale on the rule has its own half somewhere else on the same rule. A drawing at one quarter inch to the foot, printed at exactly fifty percent, is read on the eighth inch scale and the numbers come out right. A sixteenth is read on the thirty second. That is the trick the whole convention is built on, and it stops working the moment the reduction is not exactly one half.
Twenty two by thirty four onto eleven by seventeen is exactly one half, on both edges, with nothing left over. That is not a coincidence: the ANSI sheet series was built by folding, so 11 x 17 is precisely half of 22 x 34, which is precisely half of 34 x 44.
Twenty four by thirty six onto eleven by seventeen is not. The width wants 11 divided by 24, which is 45.83 percent. The height wants 17 divided by 36, which is 47.22 percent. The drawing has to fit inside both, so it comes out at 45.8 percent with a strip of white down one side. There is no scale on any rule that reads 45.8 percent.
Read a 45.8 percent print as if it were half size and everything you measure comes out about eight percent short. A twenty foot wall reads as eighteen feet four inches. That is not a number anybody questions, which is exactly the problem with it.
Which sheets halve, and which only look like they should
The ANSI series goes A 8.5 x 11, B 11 x 17, C 17 x 22, D 22 x 34, E 34 x 44, and the proportion alternates between them. So every other size is an exact half of the one two places up. ANSI C onto letter is exactly half. ANSI D onto 11 x 17 is exactly half. ANSI E onto ANSI C is exactly half, and ANSI E onto plain letter paper is exactly one quarter, which is the cleanest reduction available anywhere on this list.
The ARCH series goes A 9 x 12, B 12 x 18, C 18 x 24, D 24 x 36, E1 30 x 42, E 36 x 48, and it alternates the same way. ARCH C onto ARCH A is exactly half. ARCH D onto ARCH B is exactly half, so a 24 x 36 drawing does have a true half size sheet, it is 12 x 18 and not 11 x 17. ARCH E onto ARCH C is exactly half and onto ARCH A is exactly one quarter. ARCH E1, 30 x 42, is the odd one out: its proportion is five to seven and nothing else in the series is, so it has no half size sheet at all.
The crossings between the two series are where the trouble lives, because those are the ones people actually print. ARCH D onto 11 x 17 is 45.8 percent. ARCH D onto letter is 30.6 percent. ANSI D onto letter is 32.4 percent. Even 11 x 17 down to letter, which everybody assumes is half because a tabloid sheet is two letter sheets side by side, is 64.7 percent. Halving the area never halves the drawing.
The same trap is built into the ISO sizes, and it catches more people because the marketing says half. A3 to A4 does halve the area, and the reduction is 70.7 percent, the square root of one half. It is a beautifully designed system and it is no use at all to a scale rule.
The printer margin is what quietly destroys the ratio
The margin here is set to none by default, and that is a deliberate decision rather than a lazy one. An exact half size print only stays exactly half if the drawing is allowed the whole sheet. Ask for a quarter inch margin on all four sides and that same 22 x 34 onto 11 x 17 comes out at 47.7 percent instead of 50, and everything said above about the scale rule stops being true.
Nothing is lost by filling the sheet, because a plan sheet already carries its own border. The drawing is drawn inside a printed frame with a wider strip down the binding edge, and that frame is the margin. Adding a second one on top of it wastes paper twice: once in white space, and once in the resolution you gave up to make room for it.
A margin is the right answer for a document rather than a drawing. A specification book going into a three ring binder needs half an inch on the left. A submittal that gets stapled needs a quarter inch so the staple does not eat a word. Neither of those is measured with a rule, so neither of them cares about the ratio.
And when the margin is the only thing between you and an exact ratio, it says so in those words rather than leaving you to work it out from a percentage. Set the margin to none and this is exactly half size is a sentence somebody can act on. Forty seven point seven percent is not.
What it keeps, and what a resize usually throws away
The pages are changed inside the file that was opened. They are not copied into a new blank document, which is how nearly every browser based resizer does it, and that difference costs more than it sounds like it should.
Copying pages into a new document leaves the form dictionary behind. A permit application with fillable boxes comes back as a flat picture of a form: every box still visible, not one of them still typeable. The same copy loses the bookmarks, which on a two hundred page specification book are the only way anybody finds section 03 30 00 without scrolling for a minute. Changing the page where it sits keeps the form fields, the bookmarks, the metadata and the links.
The links need one extra step, because a link in a PDF is a rectangle measured in page coordinates and a resized page has moved everything. Every annotation is scaled and then its rectangle is moved by hand to follow the content, so a sheet index that was clickable at full size is still clickable at half. If a file carries an annotation strange enough that the move fails, the resize still finishes and the worst case is a link left where it was.
Nothing is flattened into an image at any point. The text of a specification stays text and still searches and still copies out. The lines on a CAD drawing stay vectors, so the print is as sharp as the printer can manage rather than as sharp as some intermediate screen resolution allowed.
Pages that are stored sideways
A landscape drawing is very often not stored landscape. It is stored as a tall page carrying an instruction that says turn this ninety degrees before you show it, and the viewer obeys. Open the same file in two programs and both show you a wide sheet, while what is written in the file is a narrow one.
This is where resizers break, and they break in a way that looks fine on screen for a second. The tool reads the stored width, fits that to the sheet, and the drawing ends up rotated off the edge of the paper or squeezed into a strip down the middle. The file opens, the page count is right, and the drawing is ruined.
The measuring here is done on what you see and the writing is done on what is stored. The sheet written into the file is turned the same way round as the page it replaces, so the viewer's own rotation instruction still lands on a page the right shape. Because the margin is equal on all four sides, a drawing centered before the turn is still centered after it.
If a page is sideways because the scanner fed it in sideways, that is a different problem and this is not the tool for it. Rotate it first, then resize, and the rotation is saved into the file rather than being a thing your viewer does and forgets.
A whole folder at once
A drawing issue is rarely one file. It is a folder: architectural, structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing, each one its own PDF, each one full size. Drop the folder in and up to twenty of them are resized in one run and come back as a single zip with the same names inside, so what you get back is the folder again and not a set of files to rename.
Each file is measured and resized on its own, so a set where the structural sheets are ARCH D and the mechanical sheets came out of a different office at ANSI D still lands correctly. Every page goes on the sheet you picked, at whatever scale that page needs.
A file that will not open, and there are always one or two, is marked in the list with the reason and left out of the zip. It is never replaced with a broken copy, and your originals are never touched by any of this, because the tool only ever reads them.
All of it happens on your own device. Nothing is uploaded, because there is no server here to upload it to, and once the page has loaded it keeps working with no signal at all. That matters more on a drawing than on anything else on this site: a plan set is somebody's unreleased design, and it has no business sitting in a stranger's upload folder while you wait for a progress bar.
Questions people ask
Is 24 x 36 on 11 x 17 half size?
No, and this is the single most common mistake made with plan prints. It is 45.8 percent. The width has to come down by 11 divided by 24 and the height by 17 divided by 36, the drawing has to fit inside both, and the smaller of the two wins. A scale rule cannot read 45.8 percent.
What is exactly half size, then?
Twenty two by thirty four onto eleven by seventeen, and twenty four by thirty six onto twelve by eighteen. If you need a measurable half size copy of a 24 x 36 sheet, the sheet you want is ARCH B, 12 x 18, not tabloid. Eighteen by twenty four halves onto nine by twelve, and thirty four by forty four halves onto seventeen by twenty two and quarters onto plain letter paper.
Why does the scale matter if the drawing has dimensions written on it?
Written dimensions always govern and always win, on any print at any size. The scale rule is for everything that is not written, which on a real drawing is most of it: how far a wall is off a grid line, whether a duct clears a beam, how much slab is in a pour. On a full size sheet you measure it. On a 45.8 percent print you cannot, and nothing on the print warns you.
Does this make the file smaller?
Not meaningfully, and that is a different job. Resizing changes the paper the pages sit on, not what is drawn on them, so a file full of scanned photographs weighs almost exactly the same afterwards. If the problem is that the file will not send, use the compress tool, which re-encodes the pictures inside it and leaves the text as text.
Will my fillable boxes still work afterwards?
Yes. The pages are changed inside the file rather than copied into a new one, so the form dictionary, the fields and their appearances all survive, and the boxes move with the page. This is the part most browser resizers get wrong, and you only find out when somebody tries to type in the form and cannot.
Can it make a page bigger instead of smaller?
Yes. Pick a sheet larger than the page and it scales up, and it will tell you the percentage the same way. There is a checkbox to refuse to enlarge, which is what you want when a file is a mix of sizes and you only meant to bring the big sheets down, not blow the letter sized cover page up to match them.
What happens to a file with different page sizes in it?
Every page is measured and each distinct size is listed with its own percentage and its own verdict, because they genuinely are different answers. A permit set that is 24 x 36 drawings with a letter size cover letter bound in front will show both lines, and every page still lands on the one sheet you picked.
Why is the margin set to none by default?
Because a margin destroys an exact ratio and a plan sheet does not need one. The drawing already carries its own printed border, which is the margin, and adding a second one takes 22 x 34 onto 11 x 17 from exactly half down to 47.7 percent. Turn the margin on for a document going into a binder, which is the case where the ratio does not matter.
Is anything uploaded?
No. The file is opened by your own browser and rewritten by your own browser, and nothing about it leaves the device. There is no account, no queue and no upload folder, and the page keeps working with the network off once it has loaded.
Can it do a whole folder at once?
Up to twenty files in one run. They come back as a single zip with the same names inside, each one with the sheet size added to the end so you can tell the field copy from the original at a glance. Anything that will not open is listed with the reason and left out rather than replaced with something broken.