switch between 8.5x11 and A4 sized pages within the same book?

[Stuart Rogers]

On 21/02/2013 10:57 AM, Lise Bible wrote:
>
> I have a manual (I'm on Frame 8) in which I've used conditional text to
> show/hide tables, text, parts lists depending on if it's for the
> American market or European.
> This manual originated for a US-made product so it started life with
> 8.5x11 (US-letter size) pages. And it didn't even occur to me that it
> might need to be A4-sized for the European market.
>
> Is there a good way to switch back and forth between A4 and 8.5x11 page
> sizes, depending on which version of a book you want to print?
>

This question and the ensuing discussion reminded me of a recommendation 
made back in 1999 by Dan Emory in his fine article, "FrameMaker Template 
Design and Enforcement".  The method could be adapted for your US/A4 
situation:

--------------------
Margins for hardcopy printing waste valuable screen real estate when 
documents are viewed on-line. If a printed 81/2 x 11 document has 1-inch 
margins all the way around, 37% of the document window is occupied by 
white-space margins.

The template for this paper specifies left/right margins of 0.25”, and 
top/ bottom margins of 0.131” (i.e., from the top page edge to the top 
of the running header text frame, and from the bottom of the running 
footer text frame to the bottom page edge). Consequently, the portion of 
the document window containing white-space margins is reduced from 37% 
to 8%, permitting a higher zoom setting in the document window while 
still being able to view the entire width of the document.

Also, the font size for ordinary body text is set to 12 points rather 
than the normal size of 10 points. The larger font size and a higher 
zoom setting makes it much easier for authors and editors to read, edit, 
and manipulate text and document objects without having to zoom in to a 
setting that prevents the entire width of the page from being displayed. 
This also makes more screen real estate available outside the document 
window for dialog boxes and palettes.

In effect, this approach creates what was called “oversized repro copy” 
in that ancient era before WYSIWYG DTPs, scalable fonts, and 
high-resolution laser printers. To produce the printed documents, the 
oversized repro was shot at a reduction to produce final-sized negatives 
for offset printing.  You get the same effect by printing this paper at 
83% of full size, which reduces the 12-point body text to 10 points, 
increases the left/right margins to 0.93”, and increases the top/bottom 
margins to 1.04”.

This permits two versions of a document to coexist simultaneously in the 
same file without the necessity of changing page layouts, font sizes, or 
graphic and table sizes. In the on-line version (without the superfluous 
margins) all text, graphics, and tables are 20% larger at a 100% zoom 
setting than they would be if everything appeared in its final size.
--------------------

The entire article is available on the microtype site,
http://www.microtype.com/resources/articles/TMPDESIN_DE.PDF

HTH,

-- 
Stuart Rogers
Technical Communicator
Phoenix Geophysics Limited
3781 Victoria Park Avenue, Unit 3
Toronto, ON, Canada  M1W 3K5
+1 (416) 491-7340 x 325

http://www.phoenix-geophysics.com