This might be a silly question, but I've heard that they don't use A4 size here. I'm getting pdfs in A4 - will there be any issues printing these on the Canadian non-A4 paper? It's quite important that everything remains as is, especially the margins.
Thank you.

We use letter size, 8.5 x 11. You can set the pdf and printer to scale the printout to letter or get the sender to set their pdf print to letter size which would likely retain full integrity of the document and be a huge amount easier.

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/1006158

Thank you so much. You're always so helpful. Hopefully the designers will be able to do this for me.

@ foreigngirl
Don't forget to have the sheets ironed.

Well, of course! Couldn't have it any other way.

Every time someone sends me an A4 document and I print it out without thinking, I have to walk to the printer and remember which magic combination of buttons tell it to print out A4 on letter-sized paper. Often I press a button wrong and it comes out at whatever the local variant of A3 is instead.

This is such a common problem you'd think that printer manufacturers would have figured it out years ago. But I guess they'd sell less toner if we didn't have to print it multiple times to get the right output.

Your post has actually reminded me that the pdfs that I'll be getting are A3. So will there be issues printing this to the letter size paper?

When you choose print in Adobe Acrobat choose "Fit" in the "Paper Size and File Handling" The document will be shrunk to fit an 8.5x11 page.

+1

Thanks guys, but this won't make it to scale. So if I want to check that a 2cm line is 2cm, I won't be able to do that, right? The same applies to font sizes, weights, etc.

No you be able to do any of that.

If you want your documents actual size for A3 (11.7" x 16.5") then you need a printer capable of handling 12" x 18" paper.

Then you will be able to print A3 sized documents on 12" x 18" paper actual size.

OK, thanks. That's what I thought.

If your Canadian printer can take 11 x 17 (double page letter size, sometimes known as Tabloid) paper, you can usually force Acrobat to print an A3 image without scaling, centering the image on the page. So long as the graphics don't go right to the very edge of the A3 sheet (which, if you're looking at drawings where you'd need to scale lines, sounds quite likely) this shouldn't be a problem.

But why are you measuring lines on a paper copy anyway? Why not take measurements from screen using the measuring tools built into Acrobat Pro X or whatever it's called today? Far easier and more accurate, I'd have thought, than scaling with a ruler on a printed copy.

Well, that's what I've been doing. Checking everything on screen. But the company I work for now wants a hard copy mark-up (yes, very 19th century, I know). So now it looks like I will have to transfer all my mark-up from the electronic file to the hard copy, which is almost like doing the work twice. So I thought that I would maybe be able to avoid doing the electronic mark-up altogether and just stick to the hard copy (which is what I did when I wasn't freelance), but looks unlikely.

You can buy A4 paper from Staples. You might have to order it online as I have not seen it in the stores.