How to resize PDF drawings for printing at home

The PDFs that accompany the tutorials are provided at the size Anna has painted them in the tutorial.

This means that sometimes the reference drawing will be 'letter' size (or 'A4' size as we refer to it in the UK), or when Anna has worked at a larger scale for a painting, the PDF will be formatted to print at A3 size (twice the size of 'letter' or 'A4').

You'll be able to tell if the PDF is large format when you set the 'scale' to 'default' in the print settings. For a larger format PDF, you'll see in the preview pane on the left that the image doesn't fit on the page: 

You can easily set the PDF to print to the size you'd like for your home printer if you follow the below steps:

  1. Open the PDF, right-click on it and select 'print' from the menu
  2. When the print screen opens, look on the right hand side in the 'more settings' section. Next to 'Paper size', make sure your preferred size of paper is selected:
  3. In the 'Scale' setting, if you select 'Fit to printable area': 
  4. You'll see a preview on the left of the screen that shows you the size the drawing will be printed at: 
  5. If you're happy with the size of the drawing in the preview, skip to step 7. If you want the drawing to print at a different size to the one in the preview, select 'custom' from the options in the menu instead of 'Fit to printable area': 
  6. In the box that appears under where it says 'custom', you can experiment and change the percentage to a larger or smaller number and look in the preview until it appears at about the size you want:
  7. When you're happy with the scaling, press 'print'

Note that you'll be limited by the size of the printer you have - most home printers can only print up to letter size or A4. If you want to print your drawing larger than this, check out this article for advice.

nb. the above settings outline the process you'll follow if you're using Chrome, which is the browser we recommend for using the School website. If you use a different browser, the steps you need to follow may vary but you should have the same options.

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