Resize PDF pages
Change every page to a standard size, such as A4 or Letter.
or drop files anywhere on this page
Your files stay in this browser. Nothing is uploaded.
About Resize
Resize PDF pages changes how a page is sized or framed: add blank margins around existing content, or set every page to a standard size such as A4 or Letter, or a custom one. Reach for it to print cleanly on specific paper, or when content runs too close to the edge.
Content is always scaled to fit, never stretched, and the file size stays about the same either way. If the goal is a smaller file rather than a different size, use Compress instead.
How it works
- Add one or more PDFs.
- Choose Add margins and padding, or Change page size, and click Continue. The third card, Reduce the file size, sends you to Compress.
- For margins, set Margin (inches), which starts at 0.5. For a page size, pick one from the Page size list, or choose Custom size and enter a Width and Height in inches or mm.
- Choose Apply to: All pages, or Only selected pages, and click the pages you want if you chose the latter.
- Click Resize PDF and download your result, which arrives as a ZIP if you resized more than one file.
What each mode does to a page
Both modes keep the proportions of the content and centre it. They differ in what changes around it.
- Add margins and padding leaves the page the size it is. It shrinks the content by one factor until the margin you asked for fits on the shorter side, then centres it. It never enlarges, so a margin of 0 changes nothing. Because the factor is the same in both directions, the longer side ends up with a little more space than you asked for: on a Letter page with the default 0.5 inch margin, the content is scaled to about 88% and sits 0.5 inch from the left and right edges and about 0.65 inch from the top and bottom.
- Change page size sets each page to the size you choose and fits the old page inside it, scaling up or down by one factor and centring it, so spare space appears on two sides. The Page size list offers A4, A3, A2, A1, A5, Letter, Legal, Ledger, Tabloid and Executive, and shows the dimensions in points and inches once you pick one.
- Sizes are portrait, except Ledger, which is 17 by 11 inches and landscape. A landscape page fitted to A4 is shrunk to A4's width and sits between wide bands of white above and below. For a landscape target, choose Ledger, or Custom size with a Width larger than the Height.
Worked examples with real numbers
A 20-page report written for US Letter has to go to a printer that only takes A4. Choose Change page size, pick A4, leave Apply to on All pages and click Resize PDF. Letter is a little wider than A4 and a little shorter, so the width decides: each page is scaled to about 97% and ends up with roughly half an inch of blank space above and below.
Going the other way, A4 pages fitted to Letter are scaled to about 94%, leaving about 0.36 inch on the left and right. An A5 leaflet fitted to A4 goes up instead, to about 141%. Scaling up enlarges images without adding detail, so they print at a lower resolution than before.
What resizing does not move, and other limits
The tool scales the page content. It does not touch annotations, and that decides most of what can go wrong.
- Links, form fields, comments and highlight markup are annotations. They are not scaled or moved, so after a resize they can sit where they were on the old page, no longer over the text they belonged to. For a fillable form, run Flatten with Flatten only form fields first, which bakes the filled values into the page.
- The size you choose is applied to the page's stored box, before any rotation the page carries. A page holding a quarter-turn rotation value therefore comes out in the opposite orientation to the size you picked: portrait A4 on such a page displays as landscape. Check the first page of the result.
- The Margin (inches) field runs from 0 to 5. A margin of half the page's width or more, easy to reach on a small page such as A5, shrinks the content to almost nothing.
- With Only selected pages chosen and no page selected, no page changes.
- A file marked "This file needs a password" gets its own password box, and Resize PDF stays greyed out until the box reads Password OK. Nothing here caps pages or megabytes, so the ceiling is whatever your browser can hold in memory.
Resize, Crop or Compress
Resize scales content to fit a new page or frame. Crop does the opposite: it trims the visible area and leaves the content at its original size, so pages get smaller and nothing shrinks. If your real goal is a smaller file, Compress is the tool, because resizing changes dimensions and not how much data the file holds.
Frequently asked questions
Not on its own. Changing a page's dimensions or adding margins does not remove or recompress any image data, so the file size stays about the same. If you need a smaller file, use Compress instead; the "Reduce the file size" option on this tool's first screen takes you straight there.
No. Content is always scaled proportionally, never stretched to fill the new size, and centred on the page.
Add margins and padding shrinks the existing content inward and leaves blank space around it, without changing the page's own dimensions. Change page size sets every page to a specific size (A4, Letter, or a custom one) and scales the content to fit inside it.
A4, A3, A2, A1, A5, Letter, Legal, Ledger, Tabloid and Executive, or Custom size with a width and height in inches or millimetres.
Yes. Choose "Only selected pages" under Apply to, then click the pages you want in the grid. Pages you leave unselected are saved as they were.
Yes, but by size, not by rotating. Choose Ledger, or Custom size with a width larger than the height. A portrait page is not turned to fit; it is scaled to the new height and sits in the middle, with blank space to its left and right. To turn pages, use Rotate.
Yes. Choose Custom size from the Page size list, then enter a width and height in inches or millimetres.
They stay in the file, but they are not scaled or moved with the content, so they can end up misplaced. Flatten only form fields, in the Flatten tool, turns filled-in fields into part of the page before you resize.
Yes. Add multiple files and the same margin or page size is applied to every one of them, then the results come back in a ZIP.
No. The scaling and the saving are both done by the browser you are reading this in, so the PDF itself never leaves your device. The one thing left behind is the Recent files list, which names the files you added and stores a copy of any that came off your own device and was under 5 MB, until Remove or Clear all takes them off.
Related tools
This tool ran entirely in your browser and nothing was uploaded. Your Recent files list keeps a copy of local files under 5 MB until you clear it. How your files are handled.