Problem printing wide pages from PDF

moriarty

Posts: 30   +0
I'm trying to print a service manual which is in PDF form. The pages are a mix of ordinary single A4 pages, some double A4 width pages (A3, if you like!), and some pages three A4 pages wide (e.g. circuit diagrams).

I need to print the double and triple pages as individual A4 pages so that I can splice them together afterwards. The problem is that there is absolutely no way of printing the right-hand side of these pages directly from the PDF reader. I use the Foxit reader, but Acrobat has the same problem. I can print the left-hand side, and by turning on centring I can print the centre section, but that's it.

I would have tried the image-select facility of the reader, and pasted and printed from an image program, but the PDF is password protected and won't allow this. I have imported the PDF file into Irfanview and printed from there, which does work, but for some reason the print comes out very poorly. Printing in 'black-and-white' produces very poor definition. Printing in 'greyscale' the definition is OK, but a lot of the fine lines (wiring etc) disappear ( I tried adjusting the levels to improve contrast, without improvement).

The areas I CAN print directly from the PDF reader come out perfectly, so I think what I really need is some way of offsetting the page so that I can print the inaccessible right-hand sections from the reader. Does anyone know of any method (an add-in for example) that would enable me to do this?

Steve.
 
Set the page to print in landscape orientation. Look under File > Print setup (in Adobe).
 
The trouble is, that prints the whole diagram on a single piece of A4 (less than a quarter of its original size) which makes it far too small to be readable!

Edit: The above assumes that 'File > Print setup' does the same in Acrobat as it does in Foxit, which is basically the same as setting the printer to 'landscape'.
 
look for your printer options which "scale to fit page" - - unclick that option
 
'Scale to fit' is not selected. This does not enable you to print the right-hand side of the page.

I am reasonably sure that I've explored every possibility within the reader's print options, and the printer's settings. There's just no way of printing it original size!
 
I seem to have found a solution! I had another look at Acrobat and found that if I rotate the page through 180 degrees and then print, I can print the right-hand side (now of course on the left). This doesn't work in Foxit unfortunately - you can rotate the page on screen, but it still prints the right way up.
 
Thanks for the update. It might help someone else. Congrats on coming up with one solution for your problem.
 
I feel pretty stupid not to have thought of trying it before, but I stopped using Acrobat 3 or 4 years ago because it was just getting so big, and slow to start. That was when the installation file was still under 10MB, and I see its up to 32MB now.

Still, Adobe scores on this occasion!

Steve.
 
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