GentleGiant said:
Just to throw a stick in everyone's design wheel (well... if they care)
Remember, again, that this is an international board and when you design something that people are able to print out you might consider how your design looks when printed out elsewhere in the world.
For instance, an American's Letter sized design (8.5x11 (21.59x27.94 cm)) might look awful (with respect to the art, if any, but most importantly also with readability) when printed on a piece of A4 paper (21x29.7 cm <- A4 size (European standard)).
Now, granted, I don't know if this is as serious a problem that I'm putting it up to be, but it might be worth considering?!?
Btw, I'm voting for Portrait layouts
Ack! You're supposed to remind me of these things *before* i've put several dozen hours in to format and tweak the first 40% (and, by far, the detail-oriented 40%) of the material. I often design specifically with both letter and A4 in mind--that is, i use the shorter of each dimension as my baseline, so that you end up with wasted space (on the sides for letter, on the top&bottom for A4) with either paper size, but nothing is chopped. Of course, that means no full-bleed margin art, but then i'm not too fond of that to begin with.
That said, I don't think i'll bother going back to do it for this project (unless it starts getting tons of downloads once i put it up)--as i said, i'm just too far into it already, and, for some reason, it just totally slipped my mind. However, Acrobat provides a fairly reasonable solution: Shrink to Page when you print. The amount isn't enough to render things illegible (~2.5%), so, while you end up with some whitespace on the page (top&bottom when you shrink letter to A4; sides when you shrink A4 to letter), it's otherwise perfectly functional.