How to resize PDF pages, A4 to Letter, Letter to A5, in a click

A document made on Letter (8.5 × 11 in, the US standard) prints with weird margins on European A4. A document on A4 (8.27 × 11.69 in) prints with the bottom cut off on US Letter. Most printers will rescale automatically but cheaper or older ones don't, and the result is always slightly off.

The fix takes 5 seconds: open the PDF in a resizer, pick the target page size, save. Browser-only, no upload, no Acrobat license, no "sign in to download" popup.

The page sizes that actually matter

• A4, 210 × 297 mm (8.27 × 11.69 in). Worldwide standard except North America.
• US Letter, 216 × 279 mm (8.5 × 11 in). US, Canada, parts of Latin America.
• US Legal, 216 × 356 mm (8.5 × 14 in). US legal docs, contracts.
• A3, 297 × 420 mm. Big posters, spreadsheets.
• A5, 148 × 210 mm. Pocketbooks, half-fold flyers.
• Tabloid, 279 × 432 mm. US two-up of Letter.

How resizing actually works

Two ways to do it:

1. Scale-to-fit (preserves aspect ratio). The original content is rescaled with letterbox bars added so nothing gets cropped. This is the safe default, readable, slightly different proportions, no information lost.
2. Stretch-to-fill.Content is stretched/squashed to the new page edges exactly. Looks "clean" but distorts text and images. Avoid unless you know you want it.

We default to scale-to-fit because almost nobody actually wants their text squashed.

The workflow

1. Drop your PDF into LovedPDF's resize tool
2. Pick the target page size (A4, Letter, A5, etc.)
3. Pick orientation, Auto picks portrait/landscape per source page
4. Download. The original is unchanged.

Related operations that sometimes get confused with resize

• Crop (/crop-pdf) cuts away edges, useful when scans have black margins, NOT for changing page format.
• N-up (/n-up-pdf) puts multiple original pages onto one bigger page, for handouts and spread layouts.
• Compress (/compress-pdf) reduces file size without changing dimensions.

When the printer disagrees with your resize

If you resize to A4 and the printer still prints Letter, the issue is the printer's "scale to fit" setting overriding your file. In the print dialog, look for "Page handling: actual size" (Acrobat / Preview) or untick "Scale to fit printable area" (Chrome). Now the file's actual page size is honoured.

Related

• Resize PDF Pages, the tool this post is about
• Crop PDF, for trimming margins
• N-up PDF, multiple pages per sheet
• Compress PDF without quality loss