Mac OS X converting A4 to US letter (or vice versa) when saving PDF file

Today I had to generate a PDF version of a Word document. Fortunately enough, Mac OS X has great integration with PDF documents, so it's possible to export a PDF document directly from the "Print" dialog of any application.

There was a little problem, however - the source Word document came in "US Letter" format and the PDF document had to remain in the same format. It turned out that the "Save as PDF" action converted the page to the local A4 format. After searching a little bit on the net I found some solutions (like this one) which seemed a little too complicated for such a simple thing.

I was thinking that I should try opening the document in OpenOffice to export it directly from there, but I decided to try out some of the options in the System Preferences before jumping in the hell of fixing the layout.

I tried switching to "American" measurement units (found under System Preferences -> International -> Formats) and it worked! After exporting the document in the correct "US Letter" format I switched back to "Metric" system and the system started generating PDFs in the plain old A4 format. Youpee!

That's it for now - I hope that you found it useful!

C ya!
Alex


PS. I'm using Mac OS X 10.4.10, so this procedure may not work in the older releases