If the top or bottom of a PDF goes missing when you print it, the file is almost certainly A4 and your printer is loaded with US Letter. The fix takes one setting, but it's worth knowing what it does to your text and when printing at actual size is the better call.
Because the two sizes don't nest. A4 is 6 mm narrower than Letter but 17.6 mm taller. Print an A4 page at actual size on Letter and the width fits with room to spare, but the extra height has nowhere to go. Centered, that's 8.8 mm lost off the top and 8.8 mm off the bottom. Then your printer can't reach the last few millimeters of the sheet anyway, usually about a quarter inch (6.35 mm), so in practice anything within roughly 15 mm of the A4 page's top or bottom edge can disappear.
Going the other way, Letter on A4, the problem flips: it's the sides that get clipped, by about 2.9 mm each.
| Paper | Inches | Millimeters | PDF points |
|---|---|---|---|
| US Letter | 8.5 × 11 in | 215.9 × 279.4 mm | 612 × 792 |
| A4 | 8.27 × 11.69 in | 210 × 297 mm | 595.28 × 841.89 |
| US Legal | 8.5 × 14 in | 215.9 × 355.6 mm | 612 × 1008 |
| A5 | 5.83 × 8.27 in | 148 × 210 mm | 419.53 × 595.28 |
PDFs measure pages in points, 72 to the inch, which is why you'll see odd numbers like 595.28 for A4's width.
Turn on scaling in the print dialog. Nearly every PDF viewer has it, under slightly different names:
Also check that the paper size in the dialog says Letter. If it says A4, some printers stop and ask for A4 paper, or print the page as if the sheet were taller. In Acrobat, untick "Choose paper source by PDF page size" if the printer keeps asking for paper you don't have.
Less than people expect. Here's what each combination does:
| Situation | Scale | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| A4 on Letter, Actual size (100%) | Full size | 8.8 mm cut off the top and the bottom; anything within about 15 mm of the edge is at risk |
| A4 on Letter, Fit or Shrink oversized pages | 94.1% (about 89.8% with 0.25 in printer margins) | Nothing lost; 11 pt text prints at about 10 pt |
| Letter on A4, Actual size (100%) | Full size | 2.9 mm cut off each side |
| Letter on A4, Fit | 97.3% (about 91.4% with margins) | Nothing lost; extra white space at top and bottom |
| Legal on Letter, Fit | 78.6% (about 75% with margins) | Nothing lost, but 11 pt text drops to about 8.5 pt |
Shrinking A4 to fit Letter costs about 6% on paper math, or 10% once the printer's own margins are taken into account. Body text at 11 pt comes out at roughly 10 pt, which most people won't notice. Legal on Letter is the one that really hurts.
When the document has normal margins. A typical A4 document with 25 mm margins has a text area of about 160 × 247 mm, which fits on Letter at 100% with about 16 mm to spare top and bottom. Print it at actual size and the text stays its real size, and you lose nothing but white space. Forms are the other case: a form designed to be filled in by hand, or measured, should print at 100% so the boxes stay the size they were meant to be.
It goes wrong with headers, footers and page numbers set close to the edge, or with designs that bleed to the edge, like flyers and certificates. Check page 1 in the print preview before you print fifty copies.
Yes, two ways. If the PDF has wide empty margins, crop them off first. Our Crop PDF tool trims the white space around the content on every page, in your browser. A cropped page scaled to fit prints larger than a full A4 page scaled to fit, because none of the shrinking is spent on blank paper. The cropping guide explains the page boxes it changes.
If you made the file, re-export it at the right size. The Word to PDF converter and the HTML to PDF converter both let you pick Letter or A4 before you convert. Reflowing the content onto the right paper always beats squeezing it afterwards.
Very, if you deal with anyone overseas. A4 is standard nearly everywhere except the US, Canada and a few other countries in the Americas. We checked the page sizes in 39 PDFs on hand, reports, manuals, brochures and decks from a mix of sources:
| What we checked | Count |
|---|---|
| PDFs we could read | 39 |
| Mostly A4 pages | 16 |
| Mostly Letter pages | 7 |
| 16:9 slide decks | 13 |
| Other sizes | 2 |
| Files mixing more than one page size | 1 |
Among the paper-sized documents, A4 outnumbered Letter by more than two to one, and one file mixed two page sizes, which means a single print setting won't suit every page. Slide decks are their own case: a 16:9 page has to shrink a lot to fit either sheet in portrait, so print them landscape.
And if a PDF prints blank or with missing text rather than cut off, that's a different problem, usually fonts. See why a PDF prints blank.
Open the print dialog, set the paper size to Letter, and choose Fit, Shrink oversized pages or Fit to printable area. The page shrinks to about 94% so nothing is cut off. If the document has normal margins, Actual size also works and keeps the text full size.
The PDF is probably A4 and you're printing on Letter at actual size. A4 is 17.6 mm taller, so the top and bottom get cut off. Turn on Fit or Shrink oversized pages in the print settings.
Rarely. Fitting A4 on Letter scales the page to about 90 to 94%, so 11 pt text prints at roughly 10 pt. Shrinking Legal to Letter is a bigger drop, to around 75 to 79%.
A4 is 210 × 297 mm and US Letter is 8.5 × 11 inches, or 215.9 × 279.4 mm. A4 is about 6 mm narrower and 17.6 mm taller. A4 is the standard almost everywhere outside the US, Canada and parts of Latin America.
You can rescale it, but the cleanest way is to re-export the original document at Letter size so the text reflows. For a PDF you can't re-export, print with Fit, or crop the margins first so the scaled page loses less.