Expert: InDesign Pro - 9/10/2007

Question
I have a very large document and want to print a portion of the page on an 11 x
17 sheet of paper.  How can this be done?

Answer
Hi Jenny, thanks for the question.

Well, there's a couple ways you can do this. If I understand you right, you want to print the document at 100% and be able to choose which section prints, and not scale it to fit everything on the page. If you did want it to scale to fit, you can choose that option in the Print dialogue window under Setup.

Okay, so if you want to print at 100% and choose the area, here's what I'd do first. Under the Setup menu in the print dialogue window, you can print tiled pages and see if that helps. It will put your document over as many pages as it needs to print everything. Experiment with different options.

Another thing you can try is to choose whether you want the document to print in the Upper Left, Center Horizontally, Center Vertically, or Top Left and see if you get what you need. If none of these work, this is what I would do.

This will work best if it's only a page or two that you want to print. I suggest trying this on a copy of your document incase there are problems. Press Cmd-A on the Mac (Ctrl-A on the PC, I believe) to select everything on the page. Then group everything by pressing Cmd-G. Now go to your File menu and select Document Setup. Change your page size (temporarily) to 11x17. Now you'll be able to move the grouped objects so that whatever you'd like to print will appear inside the page margins and everything else will be outside on the pasteboard. When you press print, the printer will read the document size as 11x17 and print accordingly.

Hope this helps! Let me know if there's anything else I can do.