Printing large documents with OOo Writer?

If you have done a large document (bigger than the standard size or the printer’s capacity) using OpenOffice.org Writer, cool! Congratulations for evading the temptation to go the desktop publishing way.

But don’t fret when you realize that OOo Writer doesn’t have the feature to shrink a large document to paper size when printing it out. OOo Draw has such feature, but it doesn’t have the capacity to handle frames the way Writer does. I had that dilemma.

It took me long before resolving to print the shrinked version through a PDF viewer. I exported the document to PDF. I fired up my favorite viewer xpdf. But I could not find the shrink/enlarge option in there. Tsk, tsk. I resorted to Acrobat Reader (my second favorite), which expectedly has that option (see image). That solved my problem.

But I wondered why xpdf didn’t have that feature. I thought that maybe xpdf automatically shrinks a large document to paper size. So I dared to open my document with xpdf and printed it right away. My theory was proven correct. (Does xpdf also automatically enlarge a small document into paper size? That’s another question.)