Best way to delete everything outside of a circle in a large editable PDF?

Jerry, I hope the lunch was delicious.

How about the file you were going to provide?

I was able to simply the art somewhat.

This is my end product:

Here is an Outline view of the edited file vs the original (I tried to keep them at relative sizes):

I brought the PDF into InDesign and printed it to the Adobe PDF driver. Not the best workflow, but it worked. Basically, anything that was showing up inside the crop area stayed intact. I tried cropping it and removing hidden data in Acrobat but the image rasterized (an old bug).

Thanks for the sample file, Jerry.

Currently, I don't think that any kind of script can process this file reasonably (while retaining all object attributes).

Can you perhaps provide the same sample file again, but this time marking the exact area that has to be cropped.

Jerry,

this is a frequently requested task. Unfortunately, there is no panacea to get the desired results. Depends on what kind of objects the file actually contains and what attributes should definitely be preserved when doing the crop operations.

Can you share a sample Illustrator file, as per your first screenshot?

You can use a script for this task, see here

https://alexbruni.ru/youtube2images/video.php?v=liui0ZUAN50

if clipping mask doesnt work with you, you can try a trick i used to do, select with direct selection tool the anchor points or an area you need, lock selection with  CMD/CTRL 2 , select all and delect the rest objects that are not locked.