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I have some 120 pages 2-colour books (with line diagrams and some grayscale pictures) designed in Coreldraw and Indesign in a specific size (8.5" x 11"). I have to now redesign the book in a smaller size (7.25" x 9.5") with no change in the content.

Can you please guide me what would be the recommended way to do this in less time?

I was thinking of exporting each individual page in TIF and them importing and resizing in the new document. Will that affect printing quality? One problem with this approach would be that I cannot edit the content of the book later. Anything else that I am missing out?

Thanks a lot

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I really would suggest you take the time to resize the InDesign document, then reflow the text throughout the book. This is only way to be certain things appear correct. Quality layout takes time, shortcuts often result in errors.

If you really want to "patch" something together, do not export as tiff. Export as a PDF document, then you can "Place" each PDF page on a new InDesign page and scale it. PDF will retain the vector and live type data, a tiff will be 100% raster.

Realize if you merely scale pages, type sizes get smaller as well. So if you set the book in 10/11pt type, you are then looking at 8-9pt type, which is far too small for most people to read comfortably -- again why I suggest reflowing the live text. And if you have footnotes or figure captions or anything set smaller than the base text size, it'll get reduced to probably unreadable sizes.

For a reduction that great, you would be better leaving type sizes as they are, then adding additional pages to the book to compensate for the smaller size.

Scaling is fine if the scale factor is minimal (5% or less), but a ~15% reduction is just too great to expect scaling to be a feasible option in my opinion.

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  • Thanks a lot ! The main problem is that the client does not want to increase the number of pages. He wants the same content resized and fitted with the same number of pages. Also just curious what advantage would PDF give over TIFF ?
    – udi
    May 27, 2017 at 18:08
  • Then, really adjusting the live document is the only viable option to me. You'd have to adjust margins, leading, spacing, figures, etc to get the same content to fit in a smaller size without adding pages. And if it's not possible... well clients aren't always right. They don't always understand technical restrictions. The primary function of a book is to be read.. if you reduce type sizes too much, you lose the purpose of the piece entirely.
    – Scott
    May 27, 2017 at 18:09
  • @udi Like I posted.. you can try it with a PDF. But print a page to look at it.. and tell your client to do the same. So you can see the actual type sizes after the reduction. Don't just look at it on screen (because it'll look fine on screen due to zooming).
    – Scott
    May 27, 2017 at 18:12

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