Increasing margins of all pages in a pdf file

Here's what I ended up doing: I added a thin Header/Footer to every page with Adobe Acrobat Pro 9. There's an option in the Header/Footer dialog that compresses the contents of every page to make space for the header/footer, which is exactly what I wanted.

I needed to shift down the text on a 109-page pdf so it would print to labels. I was able to do it in Header/Footer. Click on Tools > Pages > Header & Footer > Add Header & Footer. After you change the margin you want adjusted, click on Appearance options and select "Shrink document to avoid overwriting the document's text and graphics."

You can definitely increase the page size: Go to the Document menu -> Crop Pages and put a larger size in the Change Page Size section.

I just encountered this problem:

The solutions I considered:

Add an arbitrary blank header & footer
Change page size and re-crop to confine to your size ( not good if you have several pages that are different sizes )

The solution I used:

Print dialogue, shrink, print-to-pdf ( This could be bad if you want to preserve meta data, but there are programs for quickly adding bookmarks if that is what you are concerend about like jpdfbookmarks.)
- There are options in the print dialogue to change the page sizes to: fit, actual, shrink, or custom scale. I've had a lot of success with shrinking the pages.

You can use ScanTailor for a powerful tool for scanned books. Below is the content of its wiki page Page Layout:

At this stage you may adjust the margins added to the content box. There are two types of margins - hard and soft.

Hard margin - is that between the solid lines. They are set by the user. You can either move over any solid line, be it an inner or outer edge, or set the margins through numerical values.

Soft margin - is that between the solid and the dotted line. These margins are automatically added to bring the page size to the same size of other pages. If you see a dotted line - this means that somewhere in the project there is a page with that width (usable area of Hard + margin), and (possibly others) with that height.

This is one big page causing the soft margins in all the other pages, if only for not leveling them off.