a REAL crop!!

[pimpoum]

Hi everyone,

I have a few pdfs which have a frame around a small portion of text, and therefore, I can't remove the white margins because the crop is being hindered by this frame.

(the files are similar to these ones:
http://www.poemhunter.com/eBooks/)

So, with Adobe Acrobat Pro, I used the crop tool to remove this frame first, but it turns out that what is left outside the crop box is not REALLY removed. I think it's just the value of the margin which is changed.

THerefore, the frame is left there and I still can see it in the preview of the cropping window.

So my question is: How do you get the cropping to ACTUALLY crop, that is, to remove the unwanted area completely?

thanks!

PS: If you know of any other tool which can do that, and which keeps the bookmarks in the process, that's great too!

[thibaulthalpern]

Umm...what you need to do is press the "OK" or "Apply" button and after that it will crop. What happens is then what you see on the screen and on your reader should be only what is within the crop. That's all. At least that's the way it works for me.

I also believe if you extract the pages after the crop you will only be extracting what is within the crop and thus solving your issue.

[pimpoum]

Thanks for your reply,

my problem is that I need to perform two successive crops.

If you check one of the books in the link above, you'll see that most pages are made of a small poem in the middle of a mostly empty page, with a frame near the edge of the page.

I can't use the "remove white margins" options because it will stop at the frames so I need to perform a first crop to remove the frame and the footer, and only then will I be able to crop the white margins.

The problem is that, although after removing the frame, it does not appear on the page anymore, I still can't remove the white space because the frame seems to be still there, outside the margins.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

[Jellby]

I don't know if you can remove elements with Acrobat, but it could be possible to work with the uncompressed PDF like this:

Uncompress the PDF with pdftk (a single page in this example):

pdftk rudyard_kipling_2004_9.pdf cat 3 output a.pdf uncompress

Now edit the a.pdf file with a text editor. Near the end you'll find:

18 0 obj
<<
/Length 4339
stream

After that, comment out the first two BT...ET blocks (page footer and page number) and the following lines until the next BT, like this:

%BT
%/F3 8 Tf
%15 25 Td
%0 -8 Td
%<005A005A005A00110033005200480050002B0058005100570048005500110046005200500003001000030037004B00480003003A00520055004F0047000A0056000300330052004800570055005C0003
%002400550046004B004C00590048> Tj
%ET
%BT
%/F3 8 Tf
%15 25 Td
%576.914 -8 Td
%<0016> Tj
%-576.914 0 Td
%ET
%10 10 m
%10 782 l
%602 782 l
%602 10 l
%10 10 l
%h
%S

Since that's 21 lines (and 21 additional % characters) you have to add 21 to the length:

/Length 4360

Now you can compress back the PDF:

pdftk a.pdf output b.pdf compress

And the resulting PDF is attached.

[DDHarriman]

Hi pimpoum

You are correct, in acobat the crop function does not really crop, it just hides the “cropped” part. As an example, crop a PDF and then save it, then open it again go to the crop option, choose Set To Zero and apply this to all the pages. = you get your uncropped original PDF back.

Concerning your problem, you can do a direct crop in acrobat crop page doing it by single page, by group of pages or all the pages, forcing the crop space into the pages.
To do so you just have to choose top, left, right or bottom in the crop window and clicking in the arrows near each option crate the crop line (by inserting space between the real margin and the new one), as you are doing this you see the lines of the future crop being designed and moving in the little page showed as an example. When you are comfortable with the result you can apply this to the chosen page (the default) to a group of pages or to the all file by changing the settings in the Page Range option in the right down side of the window.

Not being a real (destructive crop) it does work as expected in the Cybook and Sony readers.

Best regards,

[RobbieClarken]

Hi pimpoum,

The Enfocus PitStop plugin for Adobe Acrobat Professional does exactly what you are after (actually removing the region outside the crop border). Bookmarks, links, etc aren't affected.

[Canuck_in_Japan]

Hi I'm also desperately looking for a way to actually crop the pages. I am having the exact same problem but the source is from a poor scan. I can read two or three pages on my iTouch and then I have to flick through about 4 pages of gibberish so I can get back to the good stuff again. It's really annoying. Can anyone suggest a free alternative for cropping PDF's? The Adobe crop may work on Sony readers but it is not working on my Epub version for Stanza on my iTouch!

[gohunter]

I use acroat to remove white margin. I can see no margin on PC,but there's still margin with prs600.Why?

[DDHarriman]

Hi gohunter

You are doing nothing wrong, and are getting exactly what I explain above.

Now, you should take care that that your prs 600 as a screen of 800 by 600 or 4 by 3, and thus all pages respect that.
This means that if you have a page that has not this relation it will fill the longer side of the page in the screen (in your case the height ) and fill with white space the other part of the screen, even if you have cropped all that space out.

I have taken the liberty to crop your file further and take out the page number’s space from it… see how it looks to you now compared to your version (file is uploaded below).

Best regards,

[kjk]

Originally Posted by Canuck_in_Japan

Hi I'm also desperately looking for a way to actually crop the pages. I am having the exact same problem but the source is from a poor scan. I can read two or three pages on my iTouch and then I have to flick through about 4 pages of gibberish so I can get back to the good stuff again. It's really annoying. Can anyone suggest a free alternative for cropping PDF's? The Adobe crop may work on Sony readers but it is not working on my Epub version for Stanza on my iTouch!

If your end goal is ePub (not just a cropped PDF), you can:
1) Crop in Acrobat
2) Export as HTML
3) Open the HTML file in Stanza or Calibre
4) Send to iPod Touch

(I actually edit it in Sigil after converting)

On the Mac, you can even do the "non destructive" crop in Acrobat, export as HTML, then open the HTML file in Safari, select Print, and "save as PDF" in the print dialog...ending up with a PDF that is destructively cropped (i.e. headers and footers will be gone)

[frabjous]

Try soPDF or PaperCrop--much easier than the above suggestions, in my experience. YMMV.

[gohunter]

hi DDHarriman

You are right!

hi frabjous

These two tools are nice. They both convert pdf to image file ,so I can not use dictionary on prs600.

[wallcraft]

Originally Posted by gohunter

They both convert pdf to image file ,so I can not use dictionary on prs600.

The soPDF tool is PDF to PDF, so the dictionary should still work (if it worked on the original).

[frabjous]

Right, PaperCrop turns it into an image-based PDF, but soPdf should keep it however it was to start, so text-based to text-based, so your dictionary should still work. (It does lose bookmarks and internal links, however, unfortunately.)

Calibre comes with a command-line tool called pdfmanipulate, which can be used to crop. I don't have any experience with it, personally, however.

There's also the pdfcrop tool from the LaTeX bundle, which works fine for me too.