Re: [docbook-apps] Page shrinking or scaling

[Vincent Hennebert <vhennebert@gmail.com>]

Hi,

Dean Nelson wrote:
> Hi y'all,
>  
> Is there a way to shrink the page size in Docbook without having to  
> reformat the doc going to PDF (FOP).
>  
> My users would like to have a "half size" manual to travel with instead of  
> a regular US Letter size page. I guess I could to this at the printers, but 
> it  would be nice if I could do it at the office.
>  
> I tried adjusting the page.height and .width but that just messed things up 
>  because the fonts were still the same size as were the images.
>  
> Any ideas?

I think your best bet is to use some PDF post-processing tool to scale
down the PDF produced by FOP. That way you are sure that both versions
will look absolutely the same, so it will be easier to, e.g., refer back
to the normal version after a first reading with the small one.

Your PDF viewer should allow you to ‘print’ the file into another PDF
file with a different scale. You can also use Ghostscript (taken from
the ps2pdf command and adapted):
    gs -q -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
        -sPAPERSIZE=halfletter -dPDFFitPage -sOutputFile=small.pdf normal.pdf


HTH,
Vincent