[willus]

You've done a great job experimenting with the options. I'm impressed. The cropbox option (-cbox) is the most powerful option because you can specify custom individual regions, and they can be page specific. E.g., try this in the "Additional options" box (keeping your other settings--e.g. margins--how they are):

-cbox1 0s,0s,0.5s,1s -cbox1 .5s,0s -cbox2- 0,0

The above options select two crop boxes on page 1 (-cbox1)--the left and right halves of the page. The -cbox2- 0,0 selects the full page for all of the rest of the pages (2 and up).

I realize this is painful because you have to manually do the regions yourself. There's no automatic parsing that works for all of the pages of your particular PDF because the graphic at the bottom of page 1 screws up the column detection, as you've shown.

I may eventually give the -grid option the ability to be page specific.