Expert: Ken Black - 7/16/2008

Question
Hi How are you? I create a small magazine for my company. The pages are made in Adobe Indesign. I have a huge problem. We send the pages to a printer, & they print the magazines for us. The pages are now 8 1/2 by 11. I need to convert these so they are 5 1/2 by 8 1/2. I tried to open a new document, and i was just going to paste the information in the new page & reduce the size but it wont let me, even when i group it. Is there a way to convert these pages to the right size, or to create a new one & paste the information inside the page and reduce it to fit without loosing resolution? Thankyou!!

Answer
Hello, I am fine, thanks for asking. And You? Well, besides the obvious.

I believe the issue you are having is related to the Scale Strokes option that is buried within the Transform palette's (F9) options (the options are located behind the arrow at the top left of the palette.)

If you are using the Scale Tool, the Scale Strokes option needs to be checked in order for the text to scale with the other grouped or even just selected objects (grouping is not necessary, although is a good practice in order to be sure you have scaled everything the same.)

Another possible way around that is to not use the Scale Tool.
Just use the Selection Tool (v) (the black arrow in your tool palette)
to grab the corner of your selected group of objects, then while holding down the Shift, Option, Command keys (mac) Ctrl, Alt, Shift (pc) you should be able to scale everything uniformly.

Keep in mind that the 8.5 x 11 page size will not uniformly fit within a 5.5 x 8.5 page. Some additional "tweaking" will be needed on your part there.

As far as the resolution is concerned, you should for the most part be all right. By reducing the everything to fit within a smaller area, you are increasing the overall effective resolution of your images. Text and other vector based graphics will be unaffected, well they'll be smaller anyway. Watch out for any graphics that will be reduce beyond 10. These will need to be reduced outside of Indesign and re-linked at the smaller size. For a more in-depth explanation of resolution visit <a href="http://www.bestprintingonline.com/resolution.htm">
the Image Resolution Explained page at BestPrintingOnline.com</a>

I hope this helps. Please feel free to contact me for further information.

Thanks,

Ken Black
<a href="http://www.bestprintingonline.com">BestPrintingOnline.com</a>