I've encountered this issue problem many times over the years and I've never found a satisfactory solution, so I thought I would present it to the forum.

I have a .pdf that I'm trying to print with Preview that is too big for 8.5 x 11 paper. I end up with copy that is either too big or too small, never proportional enough to be properly readable. I've tried the usual options over the years -- rotate, scale to fit, fill entire paper -- but I guess I haven't found the right tweaks. I'm going to stay with 8 x 11 paper, not buy legal size or anything like that.

This particular job involves a two-page document from a computer manual, with a diagram of a computer, arrows pointing to jacks, inputs, and so on, and another page with the computer's specs.

Any help would be greatly appreciated for this long, longstanding problem. I've been googling and wasting paper and ink.

ETA: Maybe this belongs in a different forum.


Edited by deniro (04/29/16 12:50 PM) ET

You say you tried "Scale to Fit", but what about using a specific scaling factor? The default setting is 100%, but you can enter in the Print dialog any percentage. Start with something like 70% and go up or down from there. You may not need to print your choice every time since the Print dialog shows a live preview of what the page will look like.

There is no guarantee that the appropriate percentage that gets the text on the page will give you readable text, but it is worth the try.

Why are you using Preview instead of Adobe Reader or Acrobat?

Printing via Adobe Reader is about as straightforward/simple as it gets.

The first thing you should do is upgrade to the last version of Snow Leopard, OS 10.6.8. You can get the OS 10.6.8 Combo Updater from here:

https://support.apple.com/kb/DL1399?locale=en_US

Just make sure that any third party software you use is compatible with OS 10.6.8.

Secondly, Adobe no longer provides support for OS 10.6.x and OS 10.7.x:

https://blogs.adobe.com/documentcloud/acrobat-and-reader-support-ending-for-mac-os-x-10-6-and-10-7/

Be that as it may, I believe this is where you would start to get the version of Adobe Reader (which is free; Adobe Acrobat is not free) you need:

https://get.adobe.com/reader/

No, I've gone over this before many times. I'm staying on 10.6.7 because 10.6.8 creates font problems, mainly jagged fonts on the screen. I spent months if not years, off and on, working on that problem and I'm not going to work on it anymore. I'm happy with the system I have now.

I don't have trouble printing with Preview. I have trouble printing large pdfs that don't fit on regular 8 x 11 paper. I deleted all Adobe software from my computer because of their security problems. As I recall, Adobe Reader wouldn't help me in this situation. I'm happy with Preview. I don't think this is a problem with Preview. I also have Skim. This is a problem because the person who created the pdf apparently thought no one would ever print it.

I could take screenshots of the two pages that I want to print and then print the screenshots.

Since this is a recurring problem, is there any chance of your linking us to a page with which you've encountered it...give us an opportunity to play?

Sure. It's the quick start guide for a desktop Dell.

Inspiron 3847 Quick Start Guide PDF (750 KB)

http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/inspiron-3847-desktop/manuals

I took a look at the page you want to print, and other than scaling it down to a size that would be close to unreadable I couldn't find a way to get the entire thing on one piece of 8 1/2 x 11 paper. (There are 3rd party apps that can print it across more than one page, but I didn't see any that will run in 10.6.7.)

The best I could figure out for you is to dispense with the extreme right hand pane of your target doc if you're happy with this command-shift-4 screenshot, and other than that, it looks like you'll have to take and print more than one screenshot unless someone else is a better sleuth than I am (Edit: which isn't the least bit unlikely),

It looks to me like the file is meant to be printed as an A5 accordion fold. If you have photoshop or illustrator or any desktop publishing app, you could create a document with just the sections you need to print.

Or, you could download this file:
(deleted)

I chopped up the pdf and made it a 6-page document. I'll leave it in my Dropbox for a few days.

Not a solution, but more of a work around...

If it's only a few pages that bring grief, perhaps you can take a screen shot of the applicable page and then print that?

Should you use SnapNDrag or one of the other screen/window/selection utilities, you may wish to set the "output" to the highest quality/resolution.

Thanks for the help. I downloaded the pdf someone made. Pretty much what I was looking for.

I took a screenshot of the parts of the pdf which showed the front and back of the Dell. Then I dragged and dropped those .pngs onto a Pages document. Beneath the images, I typed the names of the jacks/inputs that corresponded to the numbers in the diagram.

Another possibility for anyone working with pdfs. I don't have a pdf creation or editing program, but I do have an old copy of ABYY Fine Reader Sprint, which can be a handy tool for extracting images and text from pdfs. Years ago I was impressed with its OCR ability which I used quite a bit. I assume that today ABYY Fine Reader is even better than it was. A nifty -- and useful -- piece of technology.

PDF editing apps such as Adobe Acrobat or PDF Pen pro can edit textual content, but they will not reformat the document ie.changing margins, page length, repagination, renumbering lists, etc. There really is not a good way to do that short of going back to the original document and application before it was converted into PDF. There are converters that are supposed to convert PDF into Microsoft Word format which you could then edit in Word, Pages, NeoOffice/LibreOffice/OpenOffice, or some other editor that handles Word documents. However the few times I have attempted to convert PDF to Word using Adobe Acrobat, the results were pretty dismal unless the document was dead simple and even then any automatic formatting such as page numbering was lost.

Later versions of Acrobat may be better, I haven't tried converting PDF to Word in a good while and I don't have a current version of Adobe Acrobat.