scale all content in an Affinity Publisher document

[Amontillado]

I'm sure this must be in the documentation or discussed here, but I can't find a solution.

I would like to scale the content on every page to create larger margins. It would also be awesome if I could set the margins so there is a larger gap between facing pages.

Is that possible? I have a 200 page PDF to print in tabloid format and would appreciate the consistency of doing it via layout features.

Many thanks in advance. Affinity Publisher is a dream to use!

[Amontillado]

I believe I have self-rescued on this one, although it would be great if there's a more elegant approach.

The PDF was 8.5x11. I used Document->Add pages from file to load my PDF into Affinity.

After selecting all the pages, I modified the spread settings to 20% larger, 10.2x13.2.

The "scale to fit" option in the print settings scaled it back to 8.5x11.

[thomaso]

3 hours ago, Amontillado said:

I have a 200 page PDF to print

2 hours ago, Amontillado said:

I modified the spread settings to 20% larger

If I understand right you used Affinity to increase the page margin of an existing PDF? – Wouldn't it be quite similar 'just' to print the PDF in reduced size and thus achieve more margin on the printed sheets?

The print options may depend on your used PDF viewer & print app. In case you still want to increase the inner margin in particular and you use APub V2, you can zoom out to see all spreads and select with the Move Tool all objects on the right and the left pages independently. The Transform Panel enables you to move the objects to achieve the wanted inner margin.

Possibly a PDF viewer/editor allow this, too – or let you set a certain inner margin for brochure printing. Also, there may be online PDF editors that offer to modify the page sizes of a PDF.

Unfortunately Affinity does not allow to set spread properties for left and right pages independently. Alternatively you can achieve it in APub's spread property dialog with the anchor centred in two steps:
1. Increase the page width ("Anchor to Page"). This increases the inner margin.
2. Reduce the spread width ("Anchor to Spread"). This maintains the new, increased margin.

[Amontillado]

Thanks, @thomaso, I should have given more details. I appreciate the tips.

I have 200 pages of PDF that I want to add additional commentary to along with a table of contents. The 200 pages of PDF are in a half dozen separate files. I want to concatenate the files and intersperse narrative. In the process I'd like to shrink the PDF content for the purpose of expanding the page margins. That would allow adding my own footers with page numbers.

This will be printed on 11x17 paper, folded and center stapled like a tabloid. A center gap is another reason why I would like larger margins.

If 50 sheets of 20 pound proves too much to fold I'll break it into two volumes.

Scaling PDFs is more of a trick that it appears, I think. My guess, that's because PDFs can contain both images and rendered text. 

Thanks again!