How to resize a PDF to A4 or Letter

A PDF made in the United States is usually Letter; one made almost anywhere else is A4. The two look the same on screen and differ enough to matter the moment the file is printed, uploaded to a portal that checks the paper size, or merged with documents of the other kind.

Open Resize PDFFit any document to A4, Letter or Legal

Step by step

  1. Upload the PDF

    Drop the file onto Resize PDF. Every page in the document is changed in one run. There is no per-page setting.

  2. Choose the size and orientation

    Pick A4, A3, A5, Letter or Legal under Page size, then Portrait or Landscape under Orientation. The orientation applies to every page, so a landscape table inside a portrait report is scaled down onto a portrait sheet rather than kept sideways.

  3. Keep the proportions

    Under "How the content fits", Keep proportions (the default) scales each page evenly until it fits the new sheet and centres it. Stretch to fill scales width and height separately so the content covers the whole sheet, which distorts every letter unless the old and new shapes are nearly the same.

  4. Resize and download

    Press Resize PDF, then Download resized PDF. The result screen confirms the size and orientation every page now has.

Why a thin white margin appears

Letter is slightly wider and shorter than A4. Fitting a Letter page onto A4 with its proportions kept shrinks it a little to fit the width, which leaves a strip of white at the top and bottom; going from A4 to Letter leaves strips at the sides instead. Nothing is cut off. That strip is the price of not distorting the page, and on most documents nobody notices it.

Resizing does not make the file smaller

Resize changes the paper the pages sit on, not the number of megabytes. Text and line art are scaled rather than redrawn as pictures, so they stay sharp and selectable, and images are not re-compressed. If the file is too large to send, Compress PDF is the tool for that.

Common questions

Can I set a custom page size?

No. The choices are A4, A3, A5, Letter and Legal, in portrait or landscape, and every page is set to the size you pick.

Will the text get smaller?

Only as much as the new sheet requires. Moving to a larger sheet such as A3 scales the content up; moving an A4 document onto A5 scales it to roughly 70% of its original size.

Can I resize only some of the pages?

Not in one run. Split the pages you want to change into their own file with Split PDF, resize that file, then put the document back together with Merge PDF.

Other guides