My client is in the US; should my scanned documents PDF use A4 or Letter pages?
Pick Letter if your client will print the file in a US office, and A4 otherwise. With fit inside, the whole image is kept either way; only how large it is drawn and how much white space surrounds it changes.
The two sizes in numbers
A4 is the standard in the Gulf and most of the world: 210 × 297 mm, which is 595.28 × 841.89 points inside a PDF. Letter is what US offices load in their printers: about 216 × 279 mm, or 612 × 792 points. So the gap is small. Letter is a little wider and about 18 mm shorter.
It sounds like a detail, but a US printer loaded with Letter paper will either shrink an A4 page to fit or clip its edges if someone prints at actual size. Matching the paper in your client's tray avoids both.
What happens to a document image on each size
Take a scanned document of 1240 × 1754 pixels, which has the proportions of an A4 sheet, with a 10 mm margin and fit inside. These figures come from the same layout function the tool uses:
- On A4 portrait: the image is drawn 538.59 × 761.84 pt and fills the width inside the margins.
- On Letter portrait: it is drawn 519.83 × 735.31 pt, slightly smaller because the page is shorter, with wider white space at the sides.
- In both cases: nothing is cropped and the whole document is there.
Choose fill and crop instead and the same image on Letter is drawn 785.49 pt tall inside a box only 735.31 pt tall, so about 50 pt is trimmed from the top and bottom of your document. On A4 the trim is at the sides and much smaller. That is why documents should stay on fit inside.
Doing it in the tool
- Open Images to PDF, add the document photos and put them in order.
- Under Page size choose Letter. A plan line tells you how many pages will be created and their size in millimetres, so you can confirm before building.
- Leave orientation on Follow the image so a wide table gets a landscape page by itself.
- Keep the fit mode on Fit inside with a margin of 5 to 15 mm.
- Create the PDF, check the preview, then download it.
When the size barely matters
If the client will only read the file on screen or upload it into a system, either size is fine and any viewer will display it well. Page size matters once paper is involved. If you are unsure, ask one question: will you print this? That is quicker than sending two versions.
Common questions
Can I mix A4 and Letter pages in one file?
No, the page size setting applies to every page. You could build two files and merge them, but one size is cleaner.
Does sharpness change between the two sizes?
No. The image is embedded without re-encoding; it is just drawn slightly larger or smaller on the page.
What about A5?
A5 is roughly half of A4 (148 × 210 mm) and suits small receipts rather than full documents.