Resize a PDF — page size or file size

How to change a PDF's page size

1. 1Add your PDF. Drag it onto the box above or tap to browse. It is read straight into this page — no upload, no waiting.
2. 2Pick the new size. A4, A3, A5, A6, B5, Letter, Legal, Tabloid, Executive or Square — or choose Custom and type any width and height in mm, cm, inches, points or pixels.
3. 3Decide how it fits. Fit keeps every millimetre of the page, Fill covers the new page and trims the overflow, Stretch matches it exactly. Add a margin if you want breathing room around the edges.
4. 4Download. The new PDF is built on your device and saved straight to your downloads.

Your file stays on your device

Most "online" PDF tools upload your document to a server, process it there, and ask you to trust what happens next. This one doesn't. The PDF is opened, re-laid and saved inside your own browser — no upload step, no queue, and no copy of your file sitting on someone else's disk. That makes it safe for contracts, invoices, medical forms and anything else you would rather not hand over, and it is why a 200-page document resizes in about a second.

The one exception is a PDF too large to compress in a browser at all — past about 40 MB the tab runs out of memory. For those we offer to finish the job on our server, and it only happens if you press the button. The file is compressed and deleted straight away.

Resized, not re-photographed

Some tools "resize" a PDF by turning every page into a picture and stuffing the picture into a new page. You get soft text, no search, no copy-paste, and a much bigger file. KEMETORY changes the page geometry instead: the existing content is scaled and re-centred with a transform, and the page box is replaced. Text stays real text — selectable, searchable, and sharp at any size — and vector logos and charts stay crisp however far you scale them.

One honest caveat: enlarging a page enlarges the photographs inside it too, and no tool can invent detail a low-resolution scan never captured. Scaling down is always flawless; scaling a 72 dpi scan up to A3 will look like a 72 dpi scan on A3.

Making the file smaller (not the pages)

Page size and file size are two different problems, so the tool has two modes. Switch to File size when something is refusing your PDF for being too heavy — an upload form capped at 5 MB, an email that bounces at 10, a portal that wants 2. Pick the limit and KEMETORY works down to it.

Nearly all of a big PDF's weight is its images, so that is what gets touched: every embedded image is re-encoded at a lower resolution and quality, while your text, tables and vector graphics are left completely alone. The result is still a real PDF — selectable, searchable, and sharp where it counts — not a stack of photographs of your pages.

The target is not a guess. The file is rebuilt and measured at each setting, and the tool stops at the first one that genuinely fits, so it never degrades your images further than the number you asked for requires. If a PDF simply cannot reach the size you picked, it says so and gives you the smallest version it could make rather than pretending.

Fit, Fill or Stretch — which one do I want?

• Fit — the whole page is kept and scaled until it sits inside the new size. When the two shapes differ you get blank bands at the sides or top. Nothing is ever lost, so this is the right default for documents.
• Fill — the page is scaled until it covers the new size edge to edge, and whatever hangs over the edge is trimmed off. Good for photo pages and posters where a full bleed matters more than the corners.
• Stretch — the content is squashed to the exact new shape. It fills the page with no bands and no trimming, at the cost of distorting circles into ovals. Use it when the shape change is small.

Common reasons to resize a PDF

• A4 ⇄ Letter. The classic Europe/US mismatch — a document made for one prints with cut edges or odd margins on the other.
• Shrinking a poster to proof it. Drop an A2 or Tabloid design to A4 so it prints on a normal office printer.
• Booklets and handouts. Re-lay an A4 report onto A5 for a printed booklet, or onto A6 for a postcard-sized flyer.
• Print shop requirements. Suppliers often ask for one exact page size — type it into the Custom box and every page matches.
• Mixed-size documents. A PDF assembled from several sources can have pages of different sizes. Resizing every page to one size makes it print predictably.

Questions