PDF cropping software: BRISS

[MarionM]

the rss-feature didn't work at the download page in my browser. Is there another manner for getting new releases?

[slex]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Secondly--although admittedly this might be very hard to implement--could there be an option to force all pages to be the same size? Suppose, e.g., you're cropping a two column PDF. Unless you've got steady hands, probably the boxes you select won't be precisely the same, which might result in a slight zoom-level variation on devices that zoom each page to fit the device, which could be distracting. You could, e.g., force all pages into the size of the largest selection.

A less alternative to this might be to show the dimensions of each selection box while you were selecting the region, so you could manually ensure that they were the same.

But this is a great tool, and I'm happy to have it, even without these features.

I second that. It would be good to have some option to set the boxes on even and odd pages to be of the same size. Probably the box selection from the previous page can be shown with color lines, and when you reach them, the mouse could become sticky.

Another suggestion I would make is that probably zoom feature is introduced.

And if possible to make exception of some pages - e.g. some two-column articles have an abstract that spans the width of two columns and sometimes there are full-width tables in the text.

Also I think it would be good to have the possibility to resize a selection.

However this seems to be a very good tool, as it is fast and the option of having even/odd pages distinction is very useful. The above should be considered recommendations for further improvement, not criticism.

[=X=]

Awesome probably one of the best PDF cropping tools out today. It is very fast and easy to use. The GUI really is a time saver.

Issues
You have some algorithm that helps you categorize/group pages. I've notices some pages don't quit fit, they're usually the title pages and table of content that extend beyond the margins. It would be nice if the software got smarter about detecting these pages or better yet allow the user to select which pages do not fit the criteria and allow us to remove it from the page group into their own group.

Feature enhancements:
SoPDF had this feature that allowed the user to concatenate pages and crop only on the width. This feature had real potential since it made the fonts larger and easier to read. The problem with how soPDF implemented the feature was difficult to read. Since there was no way to crop the header and footer of the PD, they took up anywhere from 1/4 to 1/2 of the page. With this tool that is quit possible making such a feature very feasible since the user can now remove the header and footers.

[laborg]

Hi!

Your Feedback and feature request help me a lot to understand what the software should do - Thank you.

Currently I'm working on a version which will support setting different crop rectangles to the maximum width or height of all selected crop rectangles, so that the font size should be equal among all pages. Further more the dimension of the last crop-rectangle will overlaid when you draw a new rectangle. This should support you in getting the the crop rectangles the same size from the beginning on.

The feature of excluding a single page from a page cluster will take more time, but I have a solution in mind which should do job without performance loss.

Have a nice day,
Gerhard

[laborg]

New release is out 0.0.7

From the changelog:
* Meta information is copied to the cropped file
* Small visual fix in progress bar
* Ghost rectangle shows the size of the last drawn crop rectangle (for people who want to have equally sized pages)
* Dragging of crop rectangles (press and hold the mouse button inside a crop rectangle)
* Single removal of crop rectangles by pressing the right mouse button inside the rectangle to be deleted
* Selected crop rectangles (=>ctrl+left mouse click into the rectangle) can be sized to the maximum of all selected widths/heights.

next release will offer excluding pages from clusters...

Nice day,
Gerhard

[mlstein]

This application is coming along & it's very useful--but it destroys is the bookmarks file. That's a big drawback with complex pdfs--reconstructing the bookmarks takes a different program and lots of time. I hope you can resolve this bug, because you've done something useful and pretty elegantly, too.

[laborg]

New release 0.0.8

In this release the bookmarks should be copied to the cropped files (accommodating to new page numbers, of course)

Please try it out,
Gerhard

[mlstein]

Looks like it works perfectly. THANK YOU SO MUCH! With Foxit to add bookmarks (the windows version runs fine in WINE) and your lovely little program to trim I'm all set.

[=X=]

Originally Posted by laborg

New release 0.0.8

In this release the bookmarks should be copied to the cropped files (accommodating to new page numbers, of course)

Please try it out,
Gerhard

Awesome! You have quickly become my favorite PDF cropping app. And I thought soPDF was going to be hard to beat. Well done.

Originally Posted by mlstein

Looks like it works perfectly. THANK YOU SO MUCH! With Foxit to add bookmarks (the windows version runs fine in WINE) and your lovely little program to trim I'm all set.

This is a Java program, you do not need to run it under WINE.

=X=

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by =X=

This is a Java program, you do not need to run it under WINE.

Pretty sure mlstein is running FoxIt under WINE, not BRISS. There is a version of FoxIt for linux, but I don't think it has all the features.

[=X=]

okay I didn't read his first post.


@laborg I'm trying to figure out what the "max height" and "max width" do?

[laborg]

hi!

If you select some crop rectangles (hold down the ctrl-key and click on a rectangle) you can set all of them to the width/height of the biggest crop rectangle. This feature was introduced, so that people will have the same font size when cropping multi-column pdfs.

I'll update the help in the next version, promised!

Gerhard

[corona]

Originally Posted by laborg

So if you want to make the best out of your 6 inch try BRISS ;-)

But it works great!

[roger64]

Hi

Experiment report with BRISS and pdftohtml

Using Linux Ubuntu Lucid 32 bits.

I used Briss 0.0.8 to crop a two-columnn PDF book. I had to take out the first pages which had only one column. Then from page 9, I cropped, first the even, then the odd pages. The result was very nice and exactly what I expected. Of course, some full width titles were cut ...But I could read it easily on my 505.

Then, because I am a perfectionnist, I tried to use pdfreflow with this cropped pdf (after a pdftohtml -xml process). I thought it would be easy because it was now a one column pdf. I got a segmentation error.

So, I thought, maybe only a straight pdftohtml would be sufficient. It did indeed process the file, putting aside all the photos. But the end result was surprising: it was as if pdftohtml had processed the initial double column pdf file in a one column way. Unlegible result.

I am sure I made no mistake and did process the cropped one column pdf file. I can't explain this result. It is as if the BRISS file "remembered" its initial double columns.

To sum it up :
- BRISS is very efficient to crop a double-column PDF file
- processing a BRISS cropped file with pdftohtml or pdfreflow yields bad results

[slex]

Originally Posted by roger64

To sum it up :
- BRISS is very efficient to crop a double-column PDF file
- processing a BRISS cropped file with pdftohtml or pdfreflow yields bad results

I think that BRISS makes some parts of the PDF invisible, when opened with a pdf reader, but in fact doesn't remove them from the file.