I tried to read through the forum for an answer, but couldn't find one. I am using the newest Beta .pdf export to get 2d lines out of Moi to a laser cutter with a 18" x 32" bed. I use acrobat to read and "print" the generated file to my laser cutter driver. The problem I'm having is that the .pdf export seems to force an 8.5" x 11" paper size on export and won't display anything beyond that in acrobat. I can open the .pdf in illustrator and see all the information, with the 8.5" x 11" artboard.

Is this something that can be changed in MoI? Or am I missing something in Acrobat that would allow me to see all the information in the file even if not "on the page"?

Thanks!
Mike

Hi Mike, right now the PDF export page size is fixed at 8.5x11" and there isn't any way set up currently to change that. So I guess you would need to open the PDF in Illustrator and change the page size there, before you would be able to print with Acrobat and show the extra area. I don't know myself if there is a way in Acrobat to tell it to print stuff that goes over the current page size or not.

- Michael

Thanks for the prompt reply. That is what I assumed, but figured I would ask.

Also I think it may be possible to directly edit the pdf in a text editor to change the page size how you need it.

If you open the PDF file up in notepad, search for: MediaBox[ 0.000000 0.000000 612.000000 792.000000] - that's what actually defines the page size.

Those are in "points" units where 1 point = 1/72 of an inch. So for a 18" x 32" page you want that to say: MediaBox[ 0.000000 0.000000 1296.000000 2304.000000] - that's 18 * 72 and 32 * 72.

Some areas of a PDF file can't be edited with new inserted digits like that because some things are based on byte offsets from the start of the file. But for this particular thing I think it comes after all that type of stuff so I think this particular direct edit should work, it seems to be ok over here. It might not be a bad idea to slice off one of the trailing zeros after the decimal point for those 2 edited values so the file byte length stays the same.

Anyway that could be another alternative to using Illustrator for the time being.

- Michael

There's also a command line utility program here which can edit the page size:
http://podofo.sourceforge.net/tools.html

It's the podofobox utility there, an example of using it here:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5307825/how-to-crop-pdf-margins-using-pdftk-and-mediabox

- Michael