Including Multiple Page Sizes In a Single PDF

If you need to have multiple page sizes in a single document, like vertical and horizontal pages, you must first create the different page sizes in separate documents in Pages. Then you can combine them in Preview.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can combine multiple page sizes in the same document. 
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I'm often asked how you can have different page sizes in the same Pages document. For instance, you may want to have vertical pages for most of your document but maybe one horizontal page in the middle for some sort of special layout. Unfortunately, you can't have different page sizes in the same Pages document. But, you can create multiple Pages' documents, each with different page sizes and then combine them in a final PDF. 
For instance here I've got a Pages document. It's a standard vertical document here using regular page sizes. If I go to the Document's sidebar you can see I'm using US Letter here. Notice that the page size setting is under Documents. It's not under Section. So any change to the page size is going to be the same for your entire document. You can't create a new section that uses a different page size. So you're stuck with every single page in your Pages document having the same page size. This is fine for most cases. But let's say somewhere in here you want to have a horizontal page. Maybe that's because you want to print that page out differently or it is because in a PDF you can have multiple page sizes. You can simply have page 5 and 7 be one size, but page 6 in the middle be another. So the way to do that is to actually have your different page sizes in different documents. So while all of your regular pages in this example are in document 1, I've got a second document here, document 2, and this one has one horizontal page that I'm going to use in the middle of my document. 
So now for my first document I'm going to go to File and then Export To PDF. Just as an example here I'm going to export it to the Desktop, like that. Then I'm going to take the second document and I'm going to export that as well to the same location, and that will be document 2.pdf. So I've got these two pdf documents. Let's say I want to insert the second document into a page in the first document. 
So let's open up the second document first and I'm going to click on the button at the top here to show Thumbnails. I'm going to select this page here and Copy it. Then I'm going to open up the second document here and I'm going to go to where I want to insert this page. So let's say I want to do it between pages 5 and 6. So I'm going to select page 6 here and I'm going to Paste, Command V or Edit, Paste. You could see here that page 6 is now that new page I inserted and the other page moved down one. So, here's 5, here's 6, and here's 7. You could see Preview handles multiple page sizes just fine as, of course, PDF's can include multiple page sizes. I can now Save this document and Close both documents and document 1 now has this special page size here between 5 and 7. 
If your goal is to simply distribute this as a PDF, well then you're done. You've got your PDF. Note that if you're going to instead Print then you can look at the Preview here and you could see that this page is correctly handled and it is printed horizontally like that. So Preview is smart enough to do that. Of course if your goal was to Print you could have just printed each document and just this page from this document here and all the pages here and then inserted them as you like. 
Also if you're using Page Numbering you've got to be aware that you need to skip that page. So, for instance, here iI'll go to ggbhnygDocument, Section, in order to have Page Numbering turned on I need to actually have a page number on the page. So I'll go to the Header, Insert Page Number, and I'll say just 1, like that. Now you can see the formatting and now if I go here to Page 6, so I know I need to have this start a new Section here. Let's go back to page 5 and perhaps split this section at the end of a paragraph. So at the end of this paragraph, or better yet at the beginning of this one, I'll insert a Section Break. So now there is a Section Break between these two. You could see that this is page 5 and this starts a new section at page 1. But as long as I have the cursor blinking in this section here I could go to Document, Section and change this Start At as a start at 7. So now we go from page 5 to page 7. So when I insert that extra page the numbering will work out. 
Now it may seem that if you want to update your document you have to export everything again and recombine them in Preview again. But, you don't always have to do that. For instance, if I'm just updating this insert here I can make, say, some changes to this and I could do another export and replace the PDF I created before. Then go back into this PDF and I can insert this one. As a matter of fact, let me show you another way to do it. You can Drag and Drop one PDF into the other. So I can drag the new version there. You can see I've got both. Select this one and I'll hit the Delete key on the keyboard and I've just replaced this one page with a new version of it. If I wanted to replace all of the other pages and leave this one alone then it probably makes more sense to just recreate the document, inserting this new page into a new version of document 1. 
Now I know this seems like a lot of steps if you need to produce a document like this. But it has other advantages. One of which being that you can insert a page from a completely different app. For instance, I may have a spreadsheet in Numbers and I want to include that in the PDF as well. So while most of the pages come from a Pages document, this one page can come from a Numbers document. So I'm using a template here but you can set one up so that when you print it prints all nicely into one page like this. Then I can just go to Export, Export To PDF, and then export this one PDF out. I'll call this Document 3. Now if I look at Document 3 in Preview I've got this single page here that I can Copy and Paste or just Drag and Drop into this PDF. So now I've got a page in here that's a Numbers page. But it can also be a slide from Keynote, or something you've exported from another app like Word or Excel or InDesign or anything that produces a PDF. 
So while exporting different documents into PDF's and then combining them in Preview may seem like a lot of steps, it does allow for a lot of versatility. I hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 3 Responses to “Including Multiple Page Sizes In a Single PDF”

Claudio Silvaggi

9 months ago

Cool bro... thanks for sharing... did not know about the copy paste... awesome...

brad

Sections? We don't need no stinking sections! That's what I thought until now!
Lots of good tips but one thing I do poorly is combine 2 pages of info into a single printed page when using Preview, (usually to print return labels that can fit on a single page).
How's somebody that knows what they're doing handle this?
Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

Brad: For labels, see https://macmost.com/printing-labels-using-mac-pages.html

Including Multiple Page Sizes In a Single PDF

Comments: 3 Responses to “Including Multiple Page Sizes In a Single PDF”

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