Any FREE software to crop PDF pages

[toscadera]

Hello there,

how about cutting a 2-page scanned pdf into two single pages? And then remove the white space? For Mac, no command line, and preferably free

cheers
k

[frabjous]

how about cutting a 2-page scanned pdf into two single pages? And then remove the white space? For Mac, no command line, and preferably free

You don't ask for much, do you?

I think PDFRead might be your best bet in this case. But I have little experience with macs.

Originally Posted by roger64

Well, English is not my native language, as you strongly suspect. Let's try "a special tick-box for removing white space" (see the lower part of the attachment below, a screenshot from Acrobat 7)

Yeah, that won't result in a "real" crop, but it'll be fine for the Sony Reader probably. Not a free solution, though.

[droople]

Originally Posted by frabjous

The programs I mentioned and linked to will automatically calculate the whitespace and remove all the whitespace possible. If all you're cutting out is whitespace, and you don't want to leave any behind, there shouldn't be an issue.

If you want to leave any whitespace there, or you want to crop out non-empty parts of the page, things get more complicated. I give some input on doing that with calibre's pdfmanipulate program in one of the threads I linked to, but without a GUI you just have to use trial and error, or measure what you need to crop.

SoPDF is a commandline program, but there are two simple GUI wrappers for it for windows. One I wrote, which you'll find you go far enough in the thread. Another Nathan Campos wrote, which you'll find if you search the forums here at Mobileread. His is nice because it shows any errors you get in the window, but mine has some other nice features (though I'm biased). (I don't personally use either, since I don't use Windows anymore.)

If I recall correctly it's the -m3 or "Fit Height" option that will only crop, not split the pages.

There are different levels of "leaving the rest behind" vs. cropping. Adobe Acrobat's cropping feature for example, just inserts a command for hiding portions of the page which is not respected by non-Adobe PDF viewers. The methods I've listed do better than that; they do genuinely resize the page. However, they don't fully remove elements that get cropped out if you're removing more than just whitespace; they just aren't shown. If all you're cropping is whitespace, however, there's no difference.

Thank you frabjous

I will looking for GUI wrappers

[roger64]

Originally Posted by frabjous

Yeah, that won't result in a "real" crop, but it'll be fine for the Sony Reader probably. Not a free solution, though.

Your information above (which is correct) surprised me and at the same time explained why loading a so-called "cropped" page took so long on my Sony, much longer than for an average PDF whose format fits the screen.

Googling around, I read that it is nevertheless possible to "refry" this so-called "cropped" PDF, that is to save it again as a new PDF using Distiller. This time, at least, it will be really and permanently cropped, and so should load much more quickly.
http://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/refrying

As I have no experience about it, I will make some trials. It may be that "refry" means only saving to a PS file and back to PDF. It also remains to see if this operation does not damage some characters of the original file.

I wonder if it would not be possible to obtain this "refrying" feature using a free PDF printer.

[frabjous]

Originally Posted by roger64

As I have no experience about it, I will make some trials. It may be that "refry" means only saving to a PS file and back to PDF. It also remains to see if this operation does not damage some characters of the original file.

Do some tests and let us know. I gather from what I read on the link you posted that printing to the distiller is in effect the same as converting to PS and then back to PDF, so it doesn't matter which you do. Printing to Distiller sounds easier, assuming it works.

I wonder if it would not be possible to obtain this "refrying" feature using a free PDF printer.

But unless you were using Acrobat itself to do the cropping, why would you need to "refry" it to begin with? And if you have Acrobat installed, then you don't need a free PDF printer, since you have distiller.

Nevertheless, Ghostscript is certainly capable of converting from PDF to PS and then back again, and it's free software. I've used that as a method of stripping the JavaScript out of a PDF to increase security.

There are also free PDF printers like PDFCreator. But I think the effects of printing to PDFCreator would depend on what program was doing the printing, and the page settings you picked. Probably printing from Adobe Reader would do the trick—but again, unless you were using the Full Acrobat to do the cropping, why would the PDF need to be refried to begin with?

[roger64]

I just failed to really crop permanently the file with Acrobat7.

I saved the pseudo cropped PDF file as a ps, used Distiller to create a new PDF out of it with a special page model. No way, I still have lot of whitespace around it.

This does not mean though that it's impossible because I read several pages about it. "Refrying" is said to work for this.

Well, "langue au chat!"

[frabjous]

When you printed to distiller, did it have a place to pick the page size?

Anyway, not sure why you're bothering with all this. Wouldn't it just be easier to use soPDF?

[roger64]

I tried this (see attachment).

Why? Why not? I had a powerful gun and I thought I would easily kill this small rabbit. Well, I failed. Now, I am going to take a hammer...

[frabjous]

Not sure if this is the problem, but the screen size of the 505 is 90 x 120mm, not 125mm x 175mm.

[roger64]

mistake

[roger64]

Yes, but I planned to read the book half page by half page in landscape mode; from it: 120mmx175mm

[laborg]

I wrote a small application which should fit your needs:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=83053