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Can anybody help? We did a great brochure, 8 panels, total 68 cm wide (i.e. 17 cm per panel), and 24 cm height.

We are distributing the PDF via web, great response in Europe, but forgot - it's a first for us - the US has different paper sizes. People asking us to send them something they can print at their local printers.

I  calculated what we have is total 26.8 inches width, 9.4 inches high. From the websites of US printing companies I see paper size for 8 panel brochures of  8 inches x 17 inches or 8.5 x 14.6 inches, which doesn't compute.

Can anyone tell me how much we have to crop off or increase to fit US printing requirements?

thanks

Carlo 

 

GTh:

People asking us to send them something they can print at their local printers.

Are you talking about standard US paper sizes that copy shops like Kinkos would be able to print from PDF on networked copy machines? If so, the standard sizes that I am aware of are letter (8.5"x11"), tabloid/ledger (11"x17"/17"x11"), and legal (8.5"x14").

GTh:

From the websites of US printing companies I see paper size for 8 panel brochures of  8 inches x 17 inches or 8.5 x 14.6 inches, which doesn't compute.

 8x17 and 8.5x14.6 could only be done on 11x17, and you could only get full-bleed on the 8.5x14.6, if that's a concern. 8x17 would give you 4.25" pannels, but 8.5x14.6 would only give you 3.65" pannels (slightly wider than a standard business card). You could print your 9.4" high pannels on 11x17, but you would be quite a bit short of the 26.8" width of your original.

To print what you have on 11x17 you would have to print at around 63.4% (if there is no bleed), but that may give the folder a little trouble getting the pannels to line up correctly.

What you may want to do is start with the printing process and work backwards. If you want everyone to be able to go around the corner to print this at their local shop, go with a maximum of 11x17 and retool the document to fit.

Thanks for the advice. We're now starting a "North American version" from scratch, will know better next time. 

Hi, GTh,

two ways to improve your multi-national publishling maybe:

• Create two layouts with US letter and A4 in the same project (file) and use "shared content" and "item styles" to synchronized elements across layouts
• OR - if you can live with a bit of space upon printing, create a layout that fits on both without resizing.

The latter you can achieve by creating a layout using the smallest dimension of your output formats. So in case of A4 and US letter that's

• 210 mm wide (the A4 width) and
• 279.4 mm long (the height of US letter)

That gives you a small white space at the top/bottom in Europe (just 1.8 cm) and at the left/right in the US (just 0.6 cm).

Best
Matthias

Alternatively, you could demand that Americans fall in to line with the Rest Of The World™ and use internationally accepted standards. Somebody said 'Americans run the world like they spell "color", without U' Naturally, all of the above is meant in jest. I would go with the shared content feature. At least it looks like you've tailor-made the document. (Even if no-one else spots it, at least you know it's been done properly).