How to resize PDF pages to one paper size
- Check what you have
The reader reports the page size of the document you open.
- Choose one target size
A4 outside North America, US Letter inside it.
- Add a margin if you will print it
Five millimetres is enough for almost every consumer printer.
- Resize and compare
Open the result next to the original and confirm nothing near the edges has moved out of view.
Why this matters for exam and study documents
Exam boards in different countries publish on different paper. A revision pack merged from an American source and a British one prints badly until every page agrees on a size.
What is kept, what changes, and what this will not do
These are the tools that genuinely alter a document rather than rearranging it, so the trade-offs are real and worth reading before you delete the original.
Kept
- The aspect ratio of every page - nothing is stretched
- All content, scaled proportionally
- Page order and count
Changed
- Physical page dimensions
- The effective size of text, which scales with the page
- The text layer is preserved, but links and form fields are not carried across
Limits
- Links, bookmarks and interactive form fields are lost, because each page is redrawn onto a new sheet.
Questions and answers
Does resizing reduce quality?
Text and vector content scale cleanly at any size. Images are resampled to the new dimensions, so scaling a low-resolution scan up will show it.
Why have my links stopped working?
Resizing draws each page onto a new sheet, and link annotations do not survive that. If the links matter more than uniform paper, do not resize.
A4 or Letter?
A4 is standard everywhere except the United States and Canada. A4 is slightly narrower and taller than Letter, which is why a document set for one prints with odd margins on the other.