Custom Paper Sizes In Mac Pages

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to make custom page sizes in Mac Pages. 

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So in Pages when you create a new document it's going to use the default page size. So here if I go to the Document Sidebar and I look at Page Orientation it tells me it's 

8½ by 11 inches. Which is standard paper size in the United States. Now I can change the page size by clicking here and it gives me a variety of different paper sizes. These actually come from my printer driver. So if I switch to say Any Printer Here the list is going to be a little bit different. But regardless of which printer you've chosen you can't create a custom size here. So how do you do it? 

Well, you go to File and then Page Setup. In Page Setup you have a similar set of choices. Let's switch to Format For: Any Printer here. Paper Size we have at the bottom of the list, Manage Custom Sizes. Let's choose that. I'm going to click the Plus button at the bottom here and I'm going to Name it. So let's name this Special and let's do a 

5 x 6 size. Now I'm going to change the width and height here to 5 x 6. I could say 6 by 5 if that's what I want but I'm going to stick with the smaller number being the width knowing I can easily change the orientation later on. Now I've got the Margins here as well. I'm not going to worry too much about those because I can easily change the margins once I've created the document. But let's set these all to a ¼ inch. Then I'm going to click OK. 

So now when I look at paper size I'll see this as a selection here. Note it's a little bit different if I were to choose a specific printer. I'd see this size there but I can't choose it because the printer doesn't have that size in its settings. So choosing Format for any printer is very important if you want to reuse the size from the list. At this point I can use Portrait or Landscape and actually switch the orientation. I'm just going to use Portrait right here and now I can see in the Document Sidebar I've got 5 by 6. Page orientation is Portrait. I can switch it to Landscape. So you can see how easily I got 

6 by 5 there. Then I've got other information here like Margins. Margins aren't great now because I've got 1 inch margins all around but it is a small paper size. Let's go to View and then Show Layout and then on top of that View, Show Ruler so we can see what's going on here. You can see with the 1 inch margins there is not much space here. I probably want to go and set it to something else like let's do ¼ inch margins all around and let's change the Header to only be a ¼ inch and the same for the Footer, like that. So that's a more reasonable size for the body text when I'm using such a small page size. 

So now let's fill this with some sample text. Now let's try printing. I'm going to go to File Print and when I do I could see the Preview here. I could also go to PDF and Save it as a PDF or more conveniently for us in this tutorial Open in Preview. So it just creates a PDF and goes right to Preview. So I can see what's going on here. Click the Information button at the top and I could see that it is, indeed, a 5 by 6 inch PDF here. Often today we're creating word processing documents and exporting them to PDF's not really printing on physical paper. So doing unusual sizes like this can make sense a lot of times even if that paper size doesn't really exist. 

Now if I want to reuse this size I can go create a new document and then under Document here I can select it. But remember I need to select Any Printer there. If I leave it at my printer it is just going to have the sizes supported by that printer. So now I can select that 5 by 6 and easily reuse that page size all the time. As a matter of fact I can take this document right now and I could save it as a template. So I'll add it to the Template Chooser. It's right here. I can give it a name. But if I create a new one you could see how this document is created using that special page size. Better still the page sizes are system-wide. So here I am in a completely different app. TextEdit. If I go to File, Page Setup I can choose that page size right there. TextEdit doesn't show those page sizes here. It allows you to do what you want. But when I go to Print you could see it's using that page size. 

So if you have to produce a document where some of it comes Pages and others come from other apps you can use that same page size when exporting to PDF for all of them and that way you can merge them later on and everything is a consistent size. You can always go back in File and then Page Setup and then edit these sizes under the same Manage Custom Sizes dialogue here. You can select one. There's a minus button to remove it. You can even Duplicate one and then change, slightly, some of the parameters. You can always click on the name here and then rename it as well. 

Note that in Pages Preferences, under Rulers, you can set the ruler units to centimeters and then you're going to have to start a new document in order for those changes to take effect. So let's create a new document right here. Notice under Document I've got now centimeters for Page Orientation. Then I go to Manage Custom Sizes it is still going to be in inches. To actually get it to do centimeters there I need to go into System Preferences and then go to Language & Region and then go to Advanced and under there there is measurement units. If I change that to Metric now when I go in Pages to File, Page Setup then I'm going to see centimeters, or millimeters in this case, for the units. The change would be system-wide. So if you just want to do it in Pages but keep everything else in inches, it's best probably to do the conversion math and stick to inches here, or vice versa if you want to use inches here but stick with metric elsewhere. 

So I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.