Why does my content not fit the page width?

It looks like a bug, but it isn't. The program that made the PDF made this choice for you.

Say you have a wide table, a spreadsheet with a lot of columns, or a chart that runs past the margin. You convert it to PDF and the right-hand side is missing. Later in the file, usually after all the main pages, the missing columns turn up on their own, cut off from the row labels that explain them.

Why it happens

Word processors, spreadsheets and web pages can all be wider than a screen. You scroll. A spreadsheet has no real width at all. The grid goes on and on.

A PDF page has a fixed width. A4 is 210mm. Letter is 8.5 inches. The page can't be any wider than that.

So converting from one to the other forces a decision: what happens to content wider than the paper? There are only three possible answers.

1. Cut it into strips and put each strip on its own page.
2. Scale it down until it fits.
3. Clip it and lose whatever falls outside.

Most converters, and Excel by default, choose the first. Nothing is lost that way, but it is often the least useful, because a table sliced into vertical strips is hard to read as a table.

Why strip-cutting exists at all

It is a printing habit, and it made sense when printing was the point. You would print the strips and tape them together across a desk, or file them in order and read across. Wide-carriage printers and continuous stationery were normal.

Almost nobody does that now. The PDF is read on a screen or emailed, and nobody wants to open pages 12 to 15 side by side to piece one table back together.

The setting stayed after the reason for it went away.

The fix, and the mistake people make with it

The fix is scaling, option two. It is usually called fit to width or fit to one page wide.

The important part: fitting the width is different from fitting the whole sheet onto one page. Mixing them up is how you get those PDFs where four hundred rows are squeezed onto a single sheet in type nobody can read.

There are two separate settings:

• Fit to 1 page wide: scale sideways so all columns fit across.
• Fit to N pages tall: leave this unlimited.

Together they say: never cut the table sideways, but use as many pages downward as it takes. The type shrinks only as much as the width requires, and the document stays readable.

Excel to PDF, ODS to PDF and CSV to PDF all default to this, because for real documents it is nearly always the right answer.

How much shrinking is too much

Scaling is not free. There is a point where fitting the width makes the text too small to read, and at that point no setting rescues you.

Rough guidance for a portrait A4 page:

If you are in the last row, the document is trying to fit too much on one page. The fixes below can help.

Rotating the page

Landscape gives roughly 40% more width: 297mm instead of 210mm on A4. For a wide table that often turns cramped into comfortable, and the only cost is height.

Use landscape when the content is wide and not very long. Avoid it when the document is mostly text, because long lines are harder to read. The eye loses its place on the way back to the start of the next line.

Using bigger paper

A3 is twice the area of A4. If the PDF will be printed on A3, or read on a large screen, this solves width problems outright.

The catch: most people print on A4 or Letter, and an A3 PDF sent to an A4 printer gets scaled down anyway. The shrinking still happens, only now the printer does it and you have no control over it.

Fixing it at the source

Often the best fix is in the original file, before you convert.

Set a print area. A spreadsheet's used range includes that note you typed in column AR and forgot about. The converter has no way to know it is not part of the report. Select the range you want and set it as the print area. That removes the problem completely, and it is the most useful fix on this list.

Auto-fit the columns. A date column 30 characters wide is stealing space from a description column that needs it. Auto-fitting narrows the whole sheet for free before any scaling is needed.

Delete apparently-empty columns. A column with a single space in row 300 is not empty and counts toward the width.

Split the table logically. Some tables are two tables that got merged. If columns 1–8 are the order and 9–20 are the shipping detail, two documents may communicate better than one wide one.

The same problem in Word

Word documents hit this too, usually with a table that was built while the page was in landscape and then the page was changed, or one pasted from a spreadsheet.

It looks a little different: the table isn't cut into strips. Its last columns run past the right margin and off the paper. That is option three, clipping, and it is the one where you lose content.

Word to PDF scales an over-wide table back onto the page so it doesn't run off. This matters because clipping gives no warning. The PDF looks fine until someone notices a whole column is missing.

A quick way to check before you send

Whatever you converted, look at the last page of the PDF before sending it. Stray strips end up there. Thirty seconds of checking saves you from sending a report with a quarter of its columns hidden at the back.