Help me resize my Indesign document

September 18, 2008 11:57 AM

I've messed up the dimensions of a booklet I designed in Indesign CS3, and I've only realised on getting it ready for the printers. Can I scale the whole document down from B5 to A5?
posted by twistedonion to media & arts (7 comments total)

You can...the document will be about 30% smaller. Luckily you'll be retaining the same proportions, which will help a lot. I don't know how the scale will affect the design though. I would scale everything down to the new dimensions, and adjust accordingly. Elements might be getting very small, so watch for that. Good luck.
posted by Sreiny at 12:16 PM on September 18, 2008

B5 is 176 x 250mm, or a ratio of .704.

A5 is 148 x 210mm, or a ratio of .704.

So the answer is yes.
posted by felix at 12:17 PM on September 18, 2008

Thanks, this is a real Doh! moment. Was wondering why my client kept thinking the text was too small (they were scaling the pdf proofs to fit and I was just checking on screen, idiot that I am).

Everything is going to scale down fine I was just hoping (though google seems to say no) there might be a way to scale a documents content along with the pages rather than having to manually do it. Going to be a late night!
posted by twistedonion at 12:29 PM on September 18, 2008

Excellent, glad to hear it'll work out for you, except for the late night.
The joys of International paper sizes.
posted by Sreiny at 1:16 PM on September 18, 2008

Aside from bleed issues, it is quite possible that the printer can simply take the B5 design and print at A5 - but that will depend on how much layup they're doing. I've certainly been able to get printers to scale designs at the printing stage.
posted by sycophant at 1:26 PM on September 18, 2008

I'd suggest what sycophant says. You can just print at scale or even print to a PDF driver from Acrobat with a different paper size.

If you simply must have the correct document size in InDesign, you can semi-automate content scaling like this:

1. Apply new size (A5) – notice that the space has been cut as if the anchor was the middle left side of the page.
2. Select all (ctrl+a) the objects on the page
3. Object > Transform > Scale by 84% uniform (difference between B5 and A5) – notice that the anchor for the scale was the top left corner...the horizontal alignment should be fine now, but will need to be moved down vertically
4. Object > Transform > Move by 20mm vertical offset – half the difference in page height, since the page size cut was anchored in the middle
5. For each page after, select all the objects on it (ctrl+a), and execute Objects > Transform Again > Transform Sequence Again (alt + ctrl + 4) to do the same scale/move.

That should do it, unless I'm mistaken in the anchor behavior. Hopefully you haven't locked anything or use more than one layer. : /
posted by cowbellemoo at 1:46 PM on September 18, 2008

cowbelemoo has the right idea. Just print to PDF like you would if you were sending a press-ready PDF to a printer, and choose A5 for the paper size. Then choose scale to fit and everything should work fine.

If you have a bleed, calculate the ratio of bleed to height & bleed to width of the B5 document and then apply that ratio to A5 to find out the new dimensions. Then set the paper size to "Custom" and just type in those dimensions.

I remember reading about a new InDesign feature some time ago that would dynamically adjust the layout in a semi-automated manner, but 1) I can't remember what it's called; 2) can't find it in a search; 3) and I believe that it would have to be set up like this from the start.

Good luck.
posted by PixelatorOfTime at 5:11 PM on September 18, 2008