Put any page size onto A4, A3, A5, Letter or Legal — including a scan where every page is a different shape. You choose whether the content fits, fills or stretches. No signup needed.
Resize PDF NowChange your PDF dimensions in three simple steps
Drag and drop your PDF file or click to browse. We support files up to 50MB for free users.
Pick A4, A3, A5, Letter or Legal, portrait or landscape, then choose Fit to keep the whole page, Fill to cover it, or Stretch for an exact match.
Click resize and download. Each page is re-rendered onto the new size, so check the first page before you print forty.
Three ways to put an old page on a new one. Picking the wrong one is why most resized PDFs come out looking wrong.
Changing a page's size is the easy part. The real question is what happens to the content that was sitting on it, and that only has three possible answers. RaptorPDF makes you choose, because there is no answer that is right for every document.
The content is scaled by whichever factor is smaller, width or height, so the whole page lands inside the new one. Nothing is ever lost. The cost is blank space on two sides whenever the old and new shapes don't match.
Take a US Legal page going to A4. Legal is 215.9 mm wide, A4 is 210 mm, so width alone would need 97.3%. But Legal is 355.6 mm tall against A4's 297 mm, which needs 83.5%. Fit uses 83.5%, the smaller of the two, and your content ends up 180.3 mm wide on a 210 mm page — a 14.8 mm empty strip down each side. That is not a bug. It is the only way to keep a tall page whole on a shorter one.
The opposite trade. Fill uses the larger factor so no white space survives, and whatever hangs over the edge is cut off. Same Legal-to-A4 job: Fill scales to 97.3% instead, the page is covered edge to edge, and roughly 50 mm of height disappears — top and bottom equally, because the content stays centred.
This is fine for a scanned photo or a poster with a bleed. It is a bad idea for anything with a header, a footer, a page number or a signature line near an edge, because those are exactly the parts that get cut.
Stretch scales width and height independently until the content is precisely the new page's dimensions. No margins, no cropping, and no preserved proportions. Circles become ovals and type gets visibly narrow or squat.
It is genuinely useful in one situation: when the source is only a hair off the target — a page that is 209.8 mm wide instead of 210 — and you want the numbers to match exactly. At that scale the distortion is invisible. For a Legal-to-A4 conversion it would squash everything to 83.5% of its height while leaving the width at 97.3%, and it will look it.
A rule that holds up: use Fit unless you know the edges of your page are empty. Fit can only ever add blank space; Fill and Stretch can destroy information, and you won't always notice on page one of forty.
Every size below can be a source page. The five highlighted rows are the targets you can resize to.
| Size | Millimetres | Inches | PDF points | Height ÷ width |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A0 | 841 × 1189 | 33.11 × 46.81 | 2383.94 × 3370.39 | 1.414 |
| A1 | 594 × 841 | 23.39 × 33.11 | 1683.78 × 2383.94 | 1.416 |
| A2 | 420 × 594 | 16.54 × 23.39 | 1190.55 × 1683.78 | 1.414 |
| A3 | 297 × 420 | 11.69 × 16.54 | 841.89 × 1190.55 | 1.414 |
| A4 | 210 × 297 | 8.27 × 11.69 | 595.28 × 841.89 | 1.414 |
| A5 | 148 × 210 | 5.83 × 8.27 | 419.53 × 595.28 | 1.419 |
| A6 | 105 × 148 | 4.13 × 5.83 | 297.64 × 419.53 | 1.410 |
| B5 | 176 × 250 | 6.93 × 9.84 | 498.90 × 708.66 | 1.420 |
| US Letter | 215.9 × 279.4 | 8.50 × 11.00 | 612 × 792 | 1.294 |
| US Legal | 215.9 × 355.6 | 8.50 × 14.00 | 612 × 1008 | 1.647 |
| Tabloid / Ledger | 279.4 × 431.8 | 11.00 × 17.00 | 792 × 1224 | 1.545 |
| Executive | 184.1 × 266.7 | 7.25 × 10.50 | 521.86 × 756 | 1.449 |
Points are what actually live inside the file: one point is 1/72 inch, and a PDF stores its page box in nothing else. If a tool ever asks you for a page size in raw numbers, it almost certainly wants these.
Every ISO A size has the same proportions — height divided by width is the square root of two, about 1.414. That is the one ratio that survives being folded in half: cut an A3 sheet across its long side and you get two A4 sheets with the identical shape. So A3 to A4 is a single scale factor of 70.7% (that is 1 ÷ √2) and the content lands on the new page with nothing left over and nothing cut. A2 to A4, two steps down, is exactly 50%.
US Letter has a ratio of 1.294 and Legal 1.647. Neither matches A4's 1.414, and nothing will make them. Any conversion between the two families leaves you choosing between a margin and a crop — which is the whole reason the Fit and Fill buttons exist.
One honest footnote on the A-series: ISO 216 rounds every dimension to a whole millimetre, so the halving is very slightly imperfect at small sizes. A5 comes out at a ratio of 1.419 rather than 1.414. Going A5 to A4 therefore leaves about 0.3 mm unaccounted for — far below what any printer or eye will register, but it is why the numbers in the table aren't all identical.
What Fit actually does to the common conversions, worked out in advance.
| Conversion | Fit scale | Content becomes | Blank space added |
|---|---|---|---|
| A3 → A4 | 70.7% | 210 × 297 mm | none — exact fit |
| A2 → A4 | 50.0% | 210 × 297 mm | none — exact fit |
| A5 → A4 | 141.4% | 209.3 × 297 mm | 0.3 mm each side |
| A4 → A3 | 141.4% | 297 × 420 mm | none — exact fit |
| A4 → A5 | 70.5% | 148 × 209.3 mm | 0.3 mm top and bottom |
| US Letter → A4 | 97.3% | 210 × 271.8 mm | 12.6 mm top and bottom |
| US Legal → A4 | 83.5% | 180.3 × 297 mm | 14.8 mm each side |
| Tabloid → A4 | 68.8% | 192.2 × 297 mm | 8.9 mm each side |
| A4 → US Letter | 94.1% | 197.6 × 279.4 mm | 9.2 mm each side |
| A4 → US Legal | 102.8% | 215.9 × 305.3 mm | 25.1 mm top and bottom |
| US Legal → US Letter | 78.6% | 169.6 × 279.4 mm | 23.1 mm each side |
| US Letter → US Legal | 100.0% | 215.9 × 279.4 mm | 38.1 mm top and bottom |
Blank space is split evenly, because resized content is centred on the new page. "Each side" means that much on the left and that much again on the right.
Letter to Legal is the odd one out and worth understanding. Both sheets are 215.9 mm wide, so the scale factor is exactly 100% — the content is not resized at all. It simply sits on a page that is 76.2 mm taller, giving you 38.1 mm of new space above and below. If you were expecting things to get bigger, that is why they didn't.
Going the other way, Legal to A4 at 83.5% is the most aggressive shrink on the list. Nine-point body text comes out around seven and a half point. It stays legible on paper but it is close to the edge of comfortable, and that is a good moment to ask whether Fill and a deliberate crop of an empty footer would serve you better.
The part most tools don't tell you, including the older version of this page.
To place a page of one size onto a page of another, RaptorPDF re-renders it. Each source page is drawn at twice its nominal size — roughly 144 dots per inch — and that image is placed on the new page at the scale you chose. It is worth knowing exactly what that means, because it has consequences that a feature list would hide.
File size moves in whichever direction the content dictates. A text-only document that was a few hundred kilobytes of vector instructions usually gets larger, because images are heavier than text. A scanned document often gets smaller, especially when shrinking, since the re-encode at 92% JPEG quality throws away data the original scan was carrying.
If selectable text matters, don't resize. Set the page size where the document is produced — the export or Print-to-PDF dialogue in Word, Pages, InDesign or your browser all let you choose it, and that path writes real text at the size you want. Resizing an existing PDF is the right tool when you have no access to the source, which is most of the time, but it is a genuine trade and you should make it knowingly.
Two completely different jobs that people search for with the same words.
"Make my PDF smaller" means one of two unrelated things, and picking the wrong tool wastes your time.
Page size is the physical dimensions of the sheet — 210 by 297 millimetres, say. That is what this page and the resize tool deal with. Changing it alters how the document prints and how much paper it needs, and has almost nothing to do with how many megabytes it occupies.
File size is how much disk the file takes, and it is driven overwhelmingly by the images inside it. Shrinking that means re-encoding those images at lower quality or lower resolution. That is compression, a different operation with a different set of trade-offs.
They can even work against each other. Resize a text document to a smaller page and the file will often grow, because you have just replaced compact text instructions with a JPEG. If what you actually needed was a 4 MB file under an email limit, resizing was the wrong move.
If you're not sure which one you're after, this walkthrough covers both and helps you tell them apart.
Resizing correctly and then printing wrong is a common way to lose an afternoon.
Here is the trap. You resize a Legal document to A4 at 83.5%, everything looks right, you send it to the printer — and it comes out smaller again, off-centre. The printer scaled it a second time.
Almost every print dialogue defaults to something like "Fit to printable area" or "Shrink oversized pages". Because printers cannot put ink right up to the paper edge, that setting shrinks your already-correct page by a further 3 to 6% to clear the unprintable border, then recentres what's left. Two scalings, compounded.
The fix is to make the two steps agree:
If content genuinely sits too close to the paper edge to print, that is a margin problem rather than a size problem, and shrinking the whole document to solve it costs you legibility everywhere. Fill with a deliberate crop of the empty edge is usually the better answer.
Scanned and merged documents regularly end up with pages of several different sizes — a Letter contract with an A4 appendix and a photographed receipt in the middle. They print unpredictably, one tray setting at a time.
Resizing fixes it, because the target size is applied to every page in the document. Choose the size most of the document already uses, keep Fit so nothing on the odd pages gets cut, and accept that the pages which weren't that shape will carry margins. A consistent document with some white space beats an inconsistent one that jams the printer.
More tools to edit and manage your PDF documents
Including the things this tool cannot do, which is usually what you need to know first.
Add your PDF, set Page size to A4, leave the scale mode on Fit, and download the result. The source page can be any size — A3, US Legal, Tabloid, or a scan with inconsistent pages all convert to A4 the same way.
A4, A3, A5, US Letter and US Legal, each in portrait or landscape, plus a Fit to content option that sizes the page to whatever is on it. Your source pages can be any size at all — the list above is the set of targets.
Yes. A3 is a source size and A4 is an available target, so this works directly. It is also the cleanest conversion there is: both are ISO A sizes with the same 1.414 height-to-width ratio, so Fit scales the content to 70.7% and it lands on A4 exactly, with no margins added and nothing cropped.
Yes. A3 is one of the available target sizes, and because both A4 and A3 are ISO A sizes with the same 1.414 ratio, Fit enlarges the content to 141.4% and it lands on A3 exactly, with no margins and nothing cropped. Bear in mind that enlarging re-renders the page at the same resolution it was captured, so a scan that was already soft will look softer at A3.
It changes the nature of the file. To place a page of one size onto another, each page is re-rendered at roughly 144 dots per inch and embedded as a JPEG. Layout is preserved exactly and it prints without visible softness at normal reading sizes, but the text becomes pixels: you can no longer search the document, select text or have a screen reader read it, and form fields and existing annotations are flattened. If selectable text matters, set the page size where the document is produced rather than resizing it afterwards.
No. The tool offers A4, A3, A5, US Letter, US Legal and Fit to content as presets, not free numeric entry. If you need an exact non-standard size, set it in the application that creates the PDF, where you can type the dimensions directly.
No — the size you choose is applied to every page in the document. That is deliberate, because the most common reason to resize is to make an inconsistent document consistent. If you only want to change part of a file, split it first, resize the part you need, then merge the pieces back together.
A4 is 210 by 297 mm and US Letter is 215.9 by 279.4 mm, so Letter is about 6 mm wider and 18 mm shorter. More importantly their proportions differ: A4's height-to-width ratio is 1.414 against Letter's 1.294. Because the shapes are not the same, converting between them always leaves either a margin or a crop. A4 is the standard almost everywhere outside North America.
Because Fit scaled the content to the smaller of the two possible factors so that nothing was lost, and the old and new page shapes do not match. Converting US Legal to A4, for example, scales to 83.5% and leaves 14.8 mm empty on each side. If the edges of your original are genuinely empty, switching to Fill will crop them instead and cover the page completely.
Resize to the size of the paper that is actually in the printer, then in the print dialogue choose Actual size or 100% rather than Fit to page. This matters: print dialogues default to shrinking pages to clear the printer's unprintable border, which scales your already-correct document a second time by a further 3 to 6% and recentres it. Setting both steps to agree is what stops that.
Usually not, and often the opposite. Page size and file size are separate things. File size is driven by the images inside the document, and shrinking that means re-encoding them, which is compression rather than resizing. A text document that is resized frequently gets larger, because compact text instructions are replaced by a JPEG.
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