How to prepare a PDF for printing

Match the page size to the paper

• A4 versus US Letter: The two everyday paper sizes are A4, 210 by 297 millimeters, used in most of the world, and US Letter, 8.5 by 11 inches, used mainly in North America. In PDF terms, A4 is 595 by 842 points and Letter is 612 by 792 points, so Letter is slightly wider and noticeably shorter.
• What the print dialog asks: Printing one on the other forces a choice in the print dialog. Actual size prints at 100 percent and can clip the edges. Fit to page, sometimes called shrink oversized pages, scales the page down slightly so everything fits.
• Check before printing: Check a document's page size in your viewer's properties before printing anything important.
• Mixed page sizes: Documents assembled from several sources may mix page sizes, and PDFs built from photos or scans can have very large pages that only print correctly with fit to page.

Margins and the unprintable edge

Most office and home printers can't print right to the edge of the paper and leave a narrow unprinted border, often a few millimeters wide.

• Keep 5 millimeters clear: As a rule of thumb, keep text, page numbers and signatures at least 5 millimeters from the edge, and more if the document might be printed with fit to page, which shrinks everything slightly.
• Careful when cropping: When trimming wide margins with Crop PDF, avoid cropping so close that content lands in that border.
• Page numbers and footers: Labels added by Add Page Numbers and Header & Footer sit roughly a third to half an inch from the edges, which suits normal printers.
• Full bleed needs a professional printer: Printing color all the way to the edge, known as full bleed, needs a professional printer and a file prepared with extra bleed area.

Orientation and rotation

• Landscape pages are fine: Landscape pages inside a portrait document, like a wide table in a report, are normal and print correctly as long as each page's rotation is set properly.
• Sideways scans are not: Problems appear when pages were scanned or exported sideways, because a printer may shrink a landscape page onto portrait paper or rotate it unexpectedly.
• Fix pages that are genuinely wrong: Check the print preview, and correct pages that are genuinely the wrong way round with Rotate PDF, which changes the page's rotation setting without altering its content.
• It affects double-sided printing: Orientation also affects double-sided printing, because the edge the paper flips on has to match how the pages are laid out, which is covered below.

Forms, comments and hidden layers

Interactive content doesn't always print the way it appears on screen.

• What may not print: Depending on the viewer and its print settings, filled-in form fields, comments, stamps and drawings may be left off the printout, or printed as small icons instead of their contents.
• Check the dialog and the preview: Look for a setting like document and markups in the print dialog, and always check the preview.
• Flatten for certainty: When a document must print exactly as it looks, and especially when it will be printed by someone else, flatten it first with Flatten PDF. Flattening renders every page, including form values and annotations, into an image, so what you see is what prints.
• Flatten a copy, not the original: Flatten a copy instead of the original, because flattened text can no longer be selected or edited.

Color, grayscale and ink

Color printing costs more, and many office printers charge per color page.

• Convert when color adds nothing: For documents where color adds nothing, converting to grayscale with Grayscale PDF before printing makes costs predictable and avoids a printer quietly using color toner for a light-gray logo.
• Check what grayscale does first: Check what grayscale does to your document first: colors with similar brightness, like red and green lines on a chart, can turn into the same gray and become impossible to tell apart. Photos and shading generally look fine in grayscale.
• Charts need more than color: For charts that must work on a black-and-white printer, labels, patterns and line styles are more reliable than color alone.

Double-sided printing and page order

Printing on both sides halves the paper, but it introduces two decisions.

• The flip edge: The first is the flip edge. For portrait pages bound along the long side, like a normal report, choose long-edge binding. For landscape layouts, including booklets, choose short-edge binding, otherwise every second side prints upside down.
• Page order: The second is page order. In documents where chapters should start on a right-hand page, a chapter that ends on a right-hand page needs a blank page after it, which is best inserted in the source document.
• Unintentional blank pages from scans are a different matter, and Remove Blank Pages clears them out.
• Test one sheet first: For anything longer than a few pages, print a single double-sided sheet first to confirm orientation.

Handouts with several pages per sheet

Slide decks and review copies rarely need a full sheet for every page.

• What N-up does: N-up PDF places two pages side by side on landscape A4, or four pages in a grid on portrait A4, scaling each to fit while keeping its proportions.
• Two-up or four-up: Two-up suits portrait documents like reports. Four-up suits slides, which are already landscape and usually have large text.
• Everything shrinks, to roughly half or a quarter of its original size, so dense pages with small type may become hard to read.
• Combine with grayscale and duplex: Combined with grayscale conversion and double-sided printing, four slides per side can print a long presentation on very few sheets.

Booklets that fold in the right order

• Why the order isn't obvious: A folded, stapled booklet looks much better than a pile of loose pages. But the page order on each sheet isn't obvious. In an eight-page booklet, the outside of the first sheet holds pages eight and one side by side.
• What Booklet PDF does: Booklet PDF performs this arrangement, called saddle-stitch imposition, placing pages on landscape A4 sheets and adding blank pages at the end when the page count isn't a multiple of four.
• How to print and fold: Print the result double-sided with a short-edge flip, stack the sheets in order, fold them in half and staple along the fold.
• A practical thickness limit: As a rule of thumb, booklets much thicker than about 40 to 60 pages become hard to fold neatly, and inner pages start to stick out at the edge.
• Where to read more: The guide to editing tools covers the related layout options. For handouts and folded booklets, the guide to printing several pages per sheet or as a booklet covers the layouts in detail.

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