I am a book writer. I wrote this year a book and it is the first time I want to get my book published. Now, I have the soft copy of book in MS Word format, I set the page size to A4.
The situation is I have footnotes, some explanatory points at the bottom and some images arranged in relation with A4 size. I want to ask, if I make a PDF file of my work (A4 work), will there be any problem in printing this to any size of page on which I want to print my work? Because I am not in a position
to change such a huge number (500) of pages to set them according to some required page format.
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Hi and welcome to Writers SE. Would you be able to clarify whether you are talking about self-publishing, or going through a publishing house? If going through a Publishing house, then they will have guidelines available on the format that they accept.– user18397Commented Sep 12, 2017 at 5:19
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I am going to a publishing centre for this.– Asad SultanCommented Sep 12, 2017 at 5:22
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Sorry to be pedantic, I'm afraid something is getting lost in translation. When you say publishing centre, does that mean you are self-publishing it (i.e. having it printed and bound at somewhere like Officeworks)? Or will it be done through an established publisher (i.e. Penguin, Tor etc)– user18397Commented Sep 12, 2017 at 5:29
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self-Published work sir.– Asad SultanCommented Sep 12, 2017 at 5:30
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This question depends largely on your page margins, print margins and whatever you are using to convert to PDF. Then the matter of scaling and image quality comes into it as well. If you are planning to print in any size other than A4, I'd strongly suggest re-scaling it before converting it to PDF– user18397Commented Sep 12, 2017 at 5:54
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2 Answers
No, there will be no problem printing an A4 format document to a smaller paper format, but of course the text will look smaller (and maybe become difficult to read).
In Word, you can simply set a new document size in your existing document, and text and footnotes will automatically distribute themselves within the new format. This is a process that takes about thirty seconds.
If you have not used Word's footnote feature but have manually placed the footnotes so that they are now not connected to their reference in the body text and will not automatically move to another page with the reference, then I can only hope that the hours you will now have to spend to reformat your text will serve as a lesson to never do this again.
Although it is possible to produce an A4 book, it's not a popular size. Try visiting a library for popular sizes of books in your genre. Then checking the recommended print sizes at print-on-demand sites such as CreateSpace. They provide Word templates for the various standard size books, I would tend to use their basic template rather than their formatted templates and reset my page layout of the A4 document to match it. CreateSpace only produce paperback formats so if you plan to release hardbacks you might find Lulu.com a better choice for templates.
