Fit, Fill or Actual: Choosing an N-up Scaling Mode

Every n-up layout divides a sheet into cells and puts one page in each. The only interesting question is what to do when the page and the cell are not the same size, and it has exactly three honest answers: make the page smaller, leave it alone and lose the overflow, or blow it up until the cell is covered and lose the overflow on the other axis.

Which answer is right depends on one thing: is the output going to be read, or cut?

Fit scales the page down until it sits inside its cell, preserving the aspect ratio, and stops at 100%. That last clause matters more than it sounds: a page that already fits is placed at exactly its native size, not enlarged to fill the space. A handout does not become sharper for being blown up 140%, and a page that grows loses its margins.

This is what you want for a reading copy, a proof, a handout, a contact sheet, lecture notes — anything whose job is to be looked at rather than trimmed to a size.

The commonest case: two A4 pages on one A4 sheet. They cannot fit at 100%, so Fit turns the sheet landscape and places them side by side at about 70%. That is the layout you wanted when you picked "2 pages per sheet". Under Actual, the same request is impossible, and older tools would quietly give you a 1-up sheet instead — asking for 2 and getting 1, with nothing said.

Fit also makes higher counts genuinely usable. Sixteen A4 pages on one A4 sheet is a thumbnail contact sheet at about 24% — small, but a real job that print rooms run all the time to proof a document's page order before committing to a run.

Actual places the page at 100% and lets the cell clip anything that does not fit.

For cut work this is not a compromise, it is the requirement. A business card is 85 × 55 mm because that is what fits a wallet. A label is the size of the bottle. A ticket has to match the scanner's window. A card scaled to fit is the wrong card, and it is wrong in a way nobody notices until a box of 500 arrives.

So Step & Repeat and Cut & Stack default to Actual, while N-up defaults to Fit. Same control, opposite defaults, because they are used for opposite jobs.

The risk with Actual is the silent crop: if the piece really is too big for the sheet you picked, something gets cut off. The honest answer is to say so before the export rather than after, so the panel names the loss:

1 per sheet on 150 × 150 mm · at 100 %, 30 mm cropped each side

Thirty millimetres a side is not a rounding error, and seeing it is the point. Either switch to Fit deliberately, or choose a sheet that holds the piece.

Fill scales until the cell is covered on both axes, which means the page overflows on whichever axis runs out last, and that overflow is cropped.

It is the right answer far less often than people expect. Use it when the cell must be covered edge to edge and the artwork has room to lose: a photographic background, a colour field, a pattern. Never use it on anything with text near the edge, a border, or a fixed finished size — you will lose the edge of the design and the crop will not be symmetrical in any way you chose.

If you find yourself reaching for Fill on a document, the real answer is usually a different sheet size or a different grid.

Most real documents are uniform. Some are not — a report with a fold-out, a scanned file where one page came from a different machine, a merged PDF assembled from several sources.

Under Fit and Fill, each page is scaled to its own cell independently. That means a mixed document comes out at mixed scales: the A4 pages at one size, the A5 pages at another, all of them complete. Under Actual, every page is placed at 100% and the oversized ones are cropped.

Neither behaviour is wrong, but both are surprising if you did not know the file was mixed — and most people do not, because nothing in a PDF viewer draws attention to it. The panel counts them:

4-up on A3 · 2 × 2 · 2 of 12 pages differ in size · each fitted to its own cell

Two of twelve is a file worth fixing. Eleven of twelve usually means the wrong file is open.

One rule covers nearly every case: if a guillotine is going to touch it, use Actual.