Exact scale and drag to crop advanced pdf printing options ?

[Jeff]

My objective: give someone a large format map as a standard PDF file and allow them to select specific areas they want to print and print them at specific scales (200%, 400%, 100%, 50%, etc.) so they fit nicely on 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper. The problem is that acrobat reader seems to be quite unpolished in this area, unless I'm missing something. I can select an area in acrobat reader and then scale using the print driver, but this is a hit-or-miss process as there seems to be no ability to constrain the select tool so it is proportional to an 8 1/2 x 11 size or at a specific scale so you end up with odd sized white borders (and it's not appropriate to scale to fit here obviously as some known scale must be maintained.)

Corel has a great print preview option for both vector Draw files and raster Paint files which allows you to specify the scale and then simply preview and drag the image in the print preview area (which shows the images within the page size of the printer selected) so you can get the perfectly scaled image just perfectly placed on the sheet. The reason I wanted to use PDF however is that it obviously has more quality than using a raster version when enlarging, and the drawing is so comlex that the draw version of it takes ages to load whereas the version distilled into a pdf loads virtually instantly, esp. on lower power machines.

Are there some pdf printing options that would allow easy scaling and cropping?

Does the latest version of acrobat pro have cropping tools that can quickly achieve the goal? Or plugins? Or competing PDF products?

[johnfl68]

Adobe Acrobat was not really intended to work that way, my guess is. You have the option to reduce a PDF that is larger than your printer size down to your printer size, but that is about the extent of it.

Acrobat Pro does have some additional printing options that allow you to set the zoom size, and the amount of image overlap from sheet to sheet, but this does not help unless your end users have Pro.

Pro does have cropping tools, but this would be for you to crop the document and save before sending it out to others.

There is the Snapshot Tool (camera with dotted box around it) that allows you to select a window from the document and place it as an image on the clipboard to be pasted into another document like MS Word. This is in both the Pro and Reader versions of Acrobat.

I believe the intent of the PDF document was to make standard documents easy to distribute to be viewed and printed on many different operating systems and printers with nearly the same results. Most people do not need the printing flexibility that you are looking for, as the documents are already in the intended size, and do not need to be enlarged or reduced with the exception of a small amount to account for varying printer margins.

I do not know of any other PDF readers that offer the options you are looking for at this time.

John

[Matt]

Does Acrobat use a vector-based rendering format for images? Jeff, if you're not tied to Acrobat, I'll bet there are several programs out there that will do this sort of thing and you could always roll your own. -Matt