pdf tool
PDF page size checker
Print shops reject files for reasons nobody can see on screen. Drop a PDF here and a report writes itself: every page measured and named, the finished size separated from the sheet it sits on, the bleed in millimetres, and a check on how close the ink runs to the trim edge.
Runs on your device. Nothing is uploaded.
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How to use it
- 1
Drop the PDF
There is no button to press. The report appears as soon as the file is read, and nothing is uploaded.
- 2
Read the verdict
One line says whether the file is ready to print or worth a look, and every check below is written out in words with a matching icon.
- 3
Check the spec sheet
Pages, finished size in millimetres, inches and points, the sheet in the file, bleed, rotation and the page unit, laid out the way a printer reads a job ticket.
- 4
Copy it to your printer
One press copies the whole report as text, ready to paste into an email to the print shop along with the file.
Your PDF never leaves this page
The file is read into memory by your browser and measured there. There is no upload, no queue and no server copy, which you can confirm in the network tab: choose a file and watch nothing happen. That matters for artwork as much as for documents, because the files people check before a print run are unreleased campaigns, tender responses and client work under embargo.
Five boxes, and the one that decides the size
A PDF page carries up to five rectangles. The media box is the only required one and describes the whole sheet. The trim box is the finished, cut size, and it is the one imposition software at a print shop actually uses to place your page on a press sheet. Between them sits the bleed box, the area that gets printed and then cut away. So a file with a 216 by 303 millimetre media box and a 210 by 297 trim box is not a strange size: it is A4 with three millimetres of bleed, and this report says exactly that.
ISO 216 has a tolerance, so this tool does too
The A series is defined by two rules: every sheet has an aspect ratio of one to the square root of two, and A0 has an area of one square metre, which lands it at 841 by 1189 millimetres. Because those are rounded to whole millimetres, the standard allows real sheets to vary: plus or minus 1.5 millimetres up to 150, 2 millimetres from 150 to 600, and 3 millimetres above that. A page measured at 209.2 by 296.5 is A4, not a custom size, and naming it anything else would send you chasing a problem that is not there.
Rotation, bleed and the unprintable border
A rotation flag changes how a page is displayed and printed without touching the stored width and height, so a portrait media box with a ninety degree rotation prints landscape. Sizes here are reported after rotation, because that is what comes off the press. The report also renders each page and measures the smallest gap between any ink and the trim edge. European printers usually ask for three millimetres of bleed and about five millimetres of quiet margin inside the trim; a normal office printer simply cannot reach the last few millimetres at all, which is why anything under ten is called out.
Limits
- The finished size comes from the trim box where one exists, and from the media box where it does not.
- Names are matched inside the ISO 216 tolerance bands, so a page more than a few millimetres out is reported as custom.
- The edge clearance check renders the first forty pages, though every page is measured.
- A password protected PDF will not open until you save an unprotected copy.
What it does not do
- It does not resize, scale or re-impose pages.
- It does not add bleed or crop marks to a file that has none.
- It does not check the resolution of the images inside the pages.
Questions people ask
Why does it say custom?
Because the page is outside the ISO 216 tolerance band for every size the tool knows, which covers the A, B and C series, ANSI, US Letter, Legal, Executive, the ARCH sizes and JIS B. That is common for scans, for artwork exported at an arbitrary size, and for documents deliberately built to a house format.
What is the difference between the sheet and the finished size?
The finished size is what the page will be after cutting, taken from the trim box. The sheet is the whole media box, which on a print ready file is larger so the colour can run past the cut line. If they are the same, the file has no bleed, which is fine for office printing and often a problem for commercial work.
Does rotation mean something is wrong?
Not by itself. A rotation flag is exactly right for a landscape table inside a portrait report, and exactly wrong for a page that was scanned in sideways and never corrected. The report names the pages carrying one so you can open them and decide which of the two you are looking at.
What is the edge clearance check?
Each page is drawn off screen and the smallest gap between any ink and the trim edge is measured in millimetres. Anything under ten is flagged, because most office printers have an unprintable border of roughly five to ten millimetres and will simply clip whatever sits inside it, with no warning.
What does a scaled page unit mean?
PDF geometry is capped at 14400 units per side, which is 200 inches. Very large pages, such as engineering drawings and billboards, get around that with a user unit multiplier on the page. The sizes here already include it, but older software ignores the entry and will report such a page far smaller than it really is.
Can it fix the sizes?
No, it reports them. Mixed page sizes are fixed by rebuilding the document in whatever made it, and bleed has to be added at the design stage because the artwork has to extend past the cut line. A tool that stretched your pages to match would move every margin on the way.
Build a document with one page size
Take what you made here into documents.
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Background reading: the question page on this.
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Written and checked by the OneCraft team. Last checked .