How to scale PDF pages using Acrobat?

If you are working with various page sizes in a single PDF, you may want to adjust the page sizes to be the same. There are different ways you can change page sizes in a PDF file using Adobe Acrobat. You can use the Crop tool, the virtual printer and the Preflight tool. Cropping won’t remove any of the PDF page, it just hides the area and content you don’t want to see. Printing a PDF to create a new PDF can make all PDF pages the same size. It however will remove interactive content on your PDF pages, links, forms, comments, etc. The Preflight tool provides us another way to scale pages in PDF file and create consistency within a PDF document that is composed of pages of varying sizes.

Open the PDF file you need to edit in Adobe Acrobat Pro version on your PC or Mac. We’ll use Acrobat Pro DC on a Windows 10 computer in this demo. Open the PDF is open in Acrobat, click Tools > Print Production. The Preflight tool can be found at the right panel. The Preflight dialog pops up, see below screenshot.

adobe acrobat pro dc for windows preflight profiles

Click Select single fixups > Options, choose Create Fixup… from the drop-down menu. You will then get another pop-up dialogue. Here you can name the new fixup as ‘scale pages‘ or give it any other descriptive name you desire. Choose Pages in the Fixup category. In the Type of fixup box find the Scale pages, adjust the page scale settings in the lower part of the dialog.

create scale pdf pages fixup using preflight tool  in acrobat pro dc for windows pc

Click the two orange buttons next to the short and long edge fields separately and create new variables. Once the New Variable creation window pops up, you need to fill in the Default Value. For example, you can create a new variable with 8.5 as the default value for the short edge, create a new variable with 11 as the default value for the long edge. After that you can click the orange buttons to view all existing variables and quickly apply a default value in the Short edge and Long edge fields. Choose Inch in the Unit or any other unit you prefer. Click OK button to create the new fixup.

scale pages in pdf file using preflight tool in acrobat pro dc for windows pc

After that you can find the fix up from Preflight > Select single fixups > Pages. Find and click to select the newly created fixup named ‘scale page’ or any other name you chose. Hit the Fix button (the wrench icon) at the bottom right corner. You will get the new pop-up dialog titled “Preflight: Specify variable value“. Here you can enter new scale values or leave unchanged to use the default values. Finally hit the OK button to start scaling the PDF pages according to the page sizes you have specified. After that the Save As PDF dialog pops up, enter a new name and choose a location to save it as a new PDF file with the updated page size on your Windows computer or Mac.

 Update Apr 2019: removed amzn.