Preventing page scaling by third parties

[Guest]

Hi there,

Is anyone aware of a way to prevent third parties from resizing PDFs while printing?

I work for an organization that's using an Optical Mark Recognition program to automate the entry of survey data. Our process involves sending PDFs to third parties who then print the documents and have participants fill them out manually. The facilitators then scan them and send the files back to us for processing.

The problem we've come up against is that some of these third parties use printers that resize the surveys. This creates a situation in which our OMR software has a difficult time interpreting the final product.

At the individual level, it's easy enough to tell people to check "Actual size" rather than "Fit to page" when printing, but we're working with large groups, and it's unlikely all of them will follow this instruction. Any ideas for how to effectively lock the document would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[try67]

I don't believe that's possible. PDF files were meant to be printable at multiple sizes. You can't limit them in that way.

You should inform these third-parties that you will reject any documents that are returned in an incorrect page size.

[Guest]

I had a feeling that might be the case. Thanks!

[Karl Heinz Kremer]

You cannot force somebody to use actual size, but you can make it less likely that somebody will use their default of "fit". When you bring up the document properties (Ctrl-D or Cmd-D), and then go to the "Advanced" tab, you can set defaults for some of the settings on the print dialog. The user can still override them, but that requires an action by the user. The problem you are dealing with is that the document may come up with "Fit" already selected, and the user not paying any attention to that. By setting the default in the document, you are preventing these types of mistakes.

Once "Page Scaling" is set to "None", when you bring up the document in Acrobat or the free Reader, it will default to "Actual Size".

[Guest]

Thanks, Karl! This is really helpful.