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How can I make the margins equal on both sides of my book's Print-Ready PDF?
How can I make the margins equal on both sides of my book's Print-Ready PDF?

Keywords: margin, margins, print-read PDF, equal, the same, mirror

Leanpub Support avatar
Written by Leanpub Support
Updated over a week ago

When you use our Print-Ready PDF export feature to produce the PDF file you'll need to get your book into print on Amazon KDP or other publishing sites (or that your own publisher may ask you for, if you have one), we make various formatting assumptions about what you'll need, based on our experience with authors over the years.

Sometimes you may want to adjust these assumptions. For example, some default Print-Ready PDF settings have a wider "inner margin" depending on whether a page is presumed to be a left-side page or a right-size page.

This is done to account for the binding process, where more paper is needed in the middle of the book, where the pages are bound together, so the inner and outer margins appear to be similar when you open the printed book.

Here are the instructions for overriding that setting:

1. Choose a Custom theme. (You can read more about book Themes here.)
2. Pick the ebook size you want.
3. Choose the Inside and Outside margins to be the same size. (This
is the key step!)
4. When exporting a print-ready PDF, choose the print book size to be
identical (or as close as possible) to the ebook size.

Every ebook size corresponds to n (>= 1) print book sizes. But even though there are multiple print book sizes for each ebook size, we do not change the print book content area. Instead, we just use the ebook content area. So, you want the print book size to be as close as possible to the print book size to reduce surprises.
​
To learn more about how this works, see this article:
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​http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/2794627-why-does-each-ebook-size-only-correspond-to-a-subset-of-the-print-ready-pdf-export-sizes-also-how-can-i-make-a-7-x-10-or-a-7-5-x-9-25-print-ready-pdf

We hope that makes sense! If you have any questions, please reach out on the Authors Forum here.


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