Resize PDF

Scale and Fit differ in whether the aspect ratio is allowed to change. Scale stretches the page content to fill the target box exactly in both directions, which is invisible when source and target proportions are close — Letter to A4, say — and clearly squashed when they are not, such as a square page forced into Legal. Fit keeps the original proportions, centres the content in the new page box and leaves white margins on whichever pair of edges is short. Neither option ever crops: no content is cut off in either mode. If you specifically want to cut content away at the edges rather than rescale it, that is what Crop PDF is for.

Nothing is ever pushed off the page, but your margins do change size along with everything else. Because the whole page is scaled as one unit, a 20 mm margin on an A3 sheet becomes a proportionally smaller margin once the page is A4 under Scale, and under Fit it keeps its proportion but sits inside extra white padding. Nothing is re-flowed, because a PDF page is a fixed layout rather than a document you can re-typeset — the tool cannot move a paragraph to a new line to respect a printer's non-printable area. If a print shop needs guaranteed margins, resize with Fit and check the result against their template.

Resizing changes page geometry, not the data inside the page, so the file size stays roughly where it was. Shrinking an A3 document to A4 does not re-encode a single embedded photo; the same image data is simply drawn into a smaller box, which is exactly why text and line art stay crisp instead of turning blurry. If a smaller file rather than a different paper size is the goal, run Compress PDF on the result, or convert it with Grayscale PDF when colour is what makes it heavy. Doing it in that order — resize first, compress second — gives the compressor the final page dimensions to work with.

Yes — each page is resized inside its own document rather than copied onto a new one, and that is what keeps everything attached to it. Interactive form fields keep their names and values, hyperlinks stay clickable, comments and stamps stay where they were relative to the content, and under Scale they stretch along with the rest of the page. Page rotation is respected too: the target size applies to the page as you actually see it, not to its unrotated box, so a landscape page that is really a quarter-turned portrait page ends up the right way round. A page with no content stream still receives the target size, so page count and order never drift.

The Custom fields take millimetres only, accepting values from 10 to 2000. To use another unit, convert first: one inch is 25.4 mm, so US Letter is 216 x 279 mm and Tabloid is 279 x 432 mm, and one PDF point is a seventy-second of an inch, so a 612 x 792 pt page is 216 x 279 mm. The three preset chips already cover the sizes people ask for most — A4 at 210 x 297 mm, Letter at 216 x 279 mm and Legal at 216 x 356 mm. The status line always repeats the target in millimetres before you press the button, so a mistyped value is easy to catch.

Resize PDF is completely free, needs no account, adds no watermark, and the document never leaves your device. The page geometry is rewritten by pdf-lib inside your browser tab; the file is read from disk locally and the resized copy is written straight to your downloads. There is no upload step, so there is also no queue, no file-size ceiling imposed by a server, and no copy of your document sitting anywhere after you close the tab. Encrypted PDFs are the one thing that will not load — the tool reports that the file could not be read, and you can unlock it first with Remove PDF password. Everything else about the document — its fonts, its embedded images, its selectable text — comes through exactly as it went in.