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I want to print out a large review article, available as a pdf, with an extra 1" left margin to facilitate getting it bound. I've heard it happens naturally in Acrobat Pro, but I don't have it and am not inclined to dish out the license fee since I don't imagine using it for anything else.

In the reader, you can only scale it by an overall percentage, which is undesirable since that would reduce the font size. I only want to increase the left margin.

So, is there any way to do this legally and free of cost (i.e. without buying any software)?

As ''sufficient prior research'', I scanned through the existing questions, and while there are many that caress this point, I found the intentions in this question closest. However, I am a windows user, and am printing an existing pdf file, so it doesn't address my concern.

I'm sorry if this happens to be a duplicate of a question that I could not find :)

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4 Answers 4

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What you may try out is defining a custom paper size in the print dialog. With the according setting of the placement of the page, you should then be able to get what you want.

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I've used Print&Share in the past to individually set printer margins. It is not free as you requested but could maybe help you.

Ricoh Print&Share printer margins

Update: I've just seen that you can change unit of measure in the General settings to Inch.

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  • Not free, sure, but helpful indeed. But hopefully, some day, someone will suggest some free work-around too. Thanks :)
    – 299792458
    Dec 8, 2015 at 13:23
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Check your (advanced) printer settings. Depending on the model and drivers, you might be able to simply tick a checkbox or use a dropdown field to enable the binding margin on either side.

E.g. for my HP Officejet printer there are two related settings: One allowing you to enable double-sided printing, the other to pick the margin's position (left or right).

This will automatically downscale your content or rearrange the layout (only if needed; again, might depend on a setting), to properly fit the pages, without you having to toy around with fake page sizes etc.

You may also try to actually edit the PDF using the tool suggested in the question linked by you (which is indeed essentially a duplicate). Just have a look at feklee's answer. Even though the initial question has been aiming at MacOS X, this answer should work cross-platform.

It might be a bit tricky to get it to work (installing dependencies and such), but overall it might be the most general approach to this problem.

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  • Yes the tick-box thing is an option (I'm clueless about the other suggestion), but suppose if I want to a generate a pdf itself with these pseudo-margins, so that I can just hit Ctrl+P and get an o/p. (This ain't a fake example, I don't carry my printer everywhere. Sometimes, you ask someone else to take a printout of your file, and don't want to leave the margins to his/her intellect). Is there a way to do that?
    – 299792458
    Jul 25, 2014 at 6:20
  • So you want to have the margins embedded into the file? Then yes, the second option is one way to go, but I'm not too deep into that topic either. :)
    – Mario
    Jul 25, 2014 at 9:13
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A 1 year late answer, However, there is a free utility to do so PDFill PDF tools utility, you can choose reformat pages and you will see a bunch of customizations including page margins!. You might need to get used to how it works and try a few times before you get what you want though, nevertheless, it's a great program.

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