How to Crop Double Page PDF Files?

[picardo]

I have a few scanned books where each PDF page has two book pages, and so they don't look so good on Kindle DX. I have Adobe Acrobat and I can use other open source tools. How can I make these books into readable PDFs?

[frabjous]

You could try PaperCrop and/or PDFRead.

Though complaining about how things look on a Kindle DX is not going to win a lot of sympathy from those of us used to 6" screens.

[laborg]

You could try BRISS ( https://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ )

Please give me feedback if it worked,
Gerhard

[i-blis]

If you have Perl installed on your machine, you can use this script of mine.

[vxf]

BRISS works great, as stated above.

[chefguru]

I just got a Kindle DX too, and I had the same problem.

Try A-PDF Page Crop. I tried the others (Briss, PDFill, etc), but found A-PDF to be a lot better because it's the only one I found that has a graphic interface where you can manipulate the crop box over the actual PDF and get exactly what you want.

You can create a crop box the size of the Kindle screen, put it over the text, and make multiple boxes on the same PDF to grab multiple new pages.

And for the people with 6 inch screens, it works just as well for you. You can set the output size of the cropped image to fit any dimensions you want. You can even save "rules" so that the next time you crop a PDF, you can just load the same thing you did before.

Give it a shot, I think you'll find it to be a LOT easier, and more powerful, than the other options out there.

http://www.a-pdf.com/page-crop/download.htm

I've tried at least 5 other cropping programs, and this one has to be the best I've found so far.

[laborg]

Originally Posted by chefguru

Try A-PDF Page Crop. I tried the others (Briss, PDFill, etc), but found A-PDF to be a lot better because it's the only one I found that has a graphic interface where you can manipulate the crop box over the actual PDF and get exactly what you want.

mhm... just registered to tell how great a-pdf (43$) is? I guess you are just interested in selling a-pdf and didn't have a look at all the open-source solutions...

[chefguru]

Originally Posted by laborg

mhm... just registered to tell how great a-pdf (43$) is? I guess you are just interested in selling a-pdf and didn't have a look at all the open-source solutions...

You're wrong... I actually installed 4 different free programs, and 3 shareware trials. None of them did what I wanted.

They all gave me the open to crop the margins by measuring from the outer edge of the document. The major problem with what I was looking for though, is that with the multi-page documents I'm scanning in with my portable scanner, the pages are very often all different sizes, and the area I'm trying to center isn't always in the exact same place from page to page. (I'm scanning sheet music, and my program auto-rotates to make the lines parallel with the top of the page.)

I'm sure you're smart enough to realize that this means I can't set a single set of margins for a program to crop, and then apply it to all the pages. And I sure as hell don't want to go through 13 pages and adjust the margins to crop, and have to do the math on every single page to get the final output PDFs to all be exactly the same size.

This is the beauty of A-PDF (which only costs $27, not $43)... It gives me the option of setting a crop box size for the output section (not just adjusting each margin), and I can use the graphic interface to move that box on each page to center the portion I want to save.

I assume that you only saw it was shareware, and refused to try it and stuck with the open source programs?

[slex]

There are open-source solutions for this, too.

ScanTailor automatically detects content and crops the page around it. You need to break the scanned PDF in images, though.

[laborg]

Originally Posted by chefguru

I'm sure you're smart enough to realize that this means I can't set a single set of margins for a program to crop, and then apply it to all the pages. And I sure as hell don't want to go through 13 pages and adjust the margins to crop, and have to do the math on every single page to get the final output PDFs to all be exactly the same size.

And you wrote that you looked at the different open-source applications and stated that none of them is able to let you create crop boxes with a gui - and thats JUST WRONG. So if you want to make advertising (are you the author?), be so good and stick to the facts.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by chefguru

They all gave me the open to crop the margins by measuring from the outer edge of the document. The major problem with what I was looking for though, is that with the multi-page documents I'm scanning in with my portable scanner, the pages are very often all different sizes, and the area I'm trying to center isn't always in the exact same place from page to page. (I'm scanning sheet music, and my program auto-rotates to make the lines parallel with the top of the page.)

laborg's own BRISS typically lets you set different crop areas on pages with different geometries. It isn't the same for every page. It might not have worked with your document, but you could have filed a bug report and help improve the software. Open souce software needs the community to help it improve.

Some of the other open source cropping software out there (e.g., the pdfcrop perl script, ghostscript and calibre, etc.) will automatically calculate the bounding box and crop exactly to that. It does the math for you. Why should you highlight it with a GUI on each page when the software can detect it for you? I'll give you the details if you're interested.

I assume that you only saw it was shareware, and refused to try it and stuck with the open source programs?

No one is doubting it does what you say. The price, even the lower price, however, is exorbitant for what this does, and open source software open source always benefits everyone, so it's always preferable just on moral grounds.

[soondai]

Wow, that Briss program is awesome.

Had a pdf with a giant link as a footer on every page and the name of the paper at the top and it was pretty much unreadable because of it.

Works just fine now.

Thanks!

[vidgej]

Originally Posted by soondai

Wow, that Briss program is awesome.

Had a pdf with a giant link as a footer on every page and the name of the paper at the top and it was pretty much unreadable because of it.

Works just fine now.

Thanks!

Hey would you mind giving me the step by step on how to crop all the pages using Briss? thanks!

[vidgej]

Originally Posted by vidgej

Hey would you mind giving me the step by step on how to crop all the pages using Briss? thanks!

I did it! but another problem, when i converted the file to mobi using Calibre, the page numbers showed up again? what did i do wrong?

[slex]

Originally Posted by vidgej

I did it! but another problem, when i converted the file to mobi using Calibre, the page numbers showed up again? what did i do wrong?

Nothing. The program doesn't do hard crop. But I think that if you play with the settings in Calibre you could avoid page numbers showing up after conversion.