Print thumbnails and oversized documents

To fit multiple pages on a single page, you can create thumbnails—small preview versions of your document. Thumbnails are useful for verifying content and organization. Where appropriate, InDesign automatically changes the paper orientation to provide the best fit of the page to the paper; however, you’ll need to reset the original orientation if you deselect the Thumbnails option.

Although you can create InDesign documents as large as 18-by-18 feet, most desktop printers cannot print such large pages.

To print an oversized document on your desktop printer, you can print each page of your document in pieces, called tiles, and then trim and assemble those pieces. If you prefer, you can scale the document to fit the available paper size.

A document’s dimensions do not necessarily match the paper sizes used by printers. As a result, when you print, InDesign divides the oversized document into one or more rectangles, or tiles, that correspond to the page size available on the printer. You can then assemble the overlapping sections.

You can have InDesign tile a document automatically, or you can specify the tiles yourself. Tiling manually lets you control the origin point for the upper-left corner of the tile, so that you determine where the page falls on the paper.

While tiling a document automatically prints all the tiles at once, tiling a document manually requires you to print each tile separately.

To fit an oversized document on a smaller piece of paper, you can scale the document’s width and height, either symmetrically or asymmetrically. Asymmetric scaling is useful when, for example, you’re printing film for use on a flexographic press: If you know in which direction the plate will be mounted on the press drum, scaling can compensate for the 2% to 3% stretching of the plate that usually occurs. Scaling does not affect the size of the pages in the document.