Hi everyone,

I'm currently making a recipe book for charity in GIMP 2.10. I've made all of the pages on A4 templates. However, when measuring something today I noticed the results in mm were huge! This led me to realise that my documents are ginormous! 880mm x 1240mm approx. I normally have it set to pixels which don't mean a lot to me (I've not had any formal training in graphic design or the software) so I guess I didn't notice. I've already spent months on this project and the prospect of remaking all of the pages is daunting as I have my actual work to do as well. The weird thing is when I copy and paste items from a page into an actual A4 template the scale is the same. I've definitely always selected A4 template. Has anyone ever had this problem or know how to fix it? Is it just a glitch? The pages as exported JPEGS in actual size are also huge, but again I never noticed as they were always scaled fit to page before. Please help!! Thanks so much in advance!

PMan22 (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)

That's amazing thank you so much! I think that's what I was looking at and got confused as I am pretty out of my depth knowledge wise!

This entirely depends on the dpi you are going to be printing at (resolution).

A4 is about 8.27 inches wide and 11.69 inches tall. If you print at 300 pixels per inch that means your image width would be
around 2,481 pixels wide (and 3507 pixels tall).

Do you know what print resolution you will be targeting? Ask your printer
what they support and what you should be aiming for. Assuming everything is scaled correctly, it shouldn't be too big a problem
to rescale down to what's desired (although you may want to let the print
shop do this for you?).

PMan22 (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)

Hi thank you so much for helping! I plan to export as PDFs and upload them to an online printing company to print on paper. I think the size problem I had was actually just my inexperience and confusion about how these things work and it is actually fine. Really appreciate your advice!

The question I have is how do you intend to output your final recipe "book"?
Will it be printed on paper by a printer, on a copy machine or on the web?

I set up a page in GIMP the same size as yours—880mm x 1248 mm at 106 pixels
per inch (ppi)—put some 12 pt and 15 pt type on it, exported it as a jpg and
inserted it on an A4 size page in WORD. It fit perfectly on A4. It could
even be reduced a bit to allow for a binding margin on the spine. What's
the problem?

Rick S.

BTW, GIMP is not the best program for laying out text-heavy books, but you
use what you've got I guess.

-----Original Message----- From: PMan22
Sent: Friday, April 17, 2020 12:17 PM To: gimp-user-list@gnome.org
Subject: [Gimp-user] Document actual size is huge and not A4 crisis please
help!

Hi everyone,

I'm currently making a recipe book for charity in GIMP 2.10. I've made all
of
the pages on A4 templates. However, when measuring something today I noticed
the
results in mm were huge! This led me to realise that my documents are ginormous!
880mm x 1240mm approx. I normally have it set to pixels which don't mean a
lot
to me (I've not had any formal training in graphic design or the software)
so I
guess I didn't notice. I've already spent months on this project and the
prospect of remaking all of the pages is daunting as I have my actual work
to do
as well. The weird thing is when I copy and paste items from a page into an
actual A4 template the scale is the same. I've definitely always selected A4
template. Has anyone ever had this problem or know how to fix it? Is it just
a
glitch? The pages as exported JPEGS in actual size are also huge, but again
I
never noticed as they were always scaled fit to page before. Please help!!
Thanks so much in advance!

PMan22 (via www.gimpusers.com/forums)