Enlarge and print part of pdf page?

September 14, 2009 10:21 AM

How do I enlarge and print part of a pdf page?

I subscribe to the NYTimes Digest online and print out the crossword puzzle page. The print on a standard 8 1/2 by 11 page is fairly small, and by the time I finish the puzzle my eyes are tired. Besides printing out, scanning to file and using photo editing (a time-intensive process), is there a way to enlarge the part of the page on which the puzzle appears, and to print out only that part?
Thanks, members of the hive mind!

posted by ragtimepiano to computers & internet (6 comments total)

When you open it in Adobe Reader, can you highlight the puzzle with your mouse?
posted by Houstonian at 10:56 AM on September 14

Without knowing what it looks like, perhaps you could magnify the pdf in Reader, do a screen capture of the part of the page on which the puzzle appears and then print out the resulting image. (You could crop the image however you'd like depending on the image software you have if that makes the final image more user-friendly for you.)
posted by Kimberly at 11:10 AM on September 14

Foxit Reader lets you scale a PDF when printing it. It also has a tool (looks like a camera) that lets you select a portion of a PDF and copy it to the clipboard, at which point you could put it into your favorite image-editing program and scale it there.
posted by likedoomsday at 3:05 PM on September 14

Thanks--the Foxit reader works wonderfully well! Thanks to all three of you.
posted by ragtimepiano at 7:28 PM on September 14

As for Adobe Reader, there is a way without resorting to copying and pasting. Zoom in to your chosen area. You can also resize AR's window if needed. Then click on print, and choose something like "print current view" (sorry, I'm not certain how it is labelled exactly as I don't have access to AR atm). Should do the trick.
posted by noztran at 7:20 AM on September 15

On my Canon printer, for some reason the "print current view" option on
the page is inactive in adobe pdf? I can't click on that option.
posted by ragtimepiano at 4:17 AM on September 16