Acrobat is Cropping Pages When Scanning

Question

Every time I scan a document Acrobat is cropping the scanned page to something smaller than an 8.5 x 11 page (see attached document). How to I prevent this from happening?

Randy Hagan · Accepted Answer

I’m not dead sure of this, but I have some experience with HP scanners and can offer a couple of hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1 — Your HP MFP scanner driver is doing the cropping. Whenever you do a “preview” scan with most flatbed-type scanners, The preview will first a) scan the entire page and then b) automatically crop it to however it defines “live area.” Note that in the examples you provided, the “scanned pages” go to the very edge of your graphic lines and icons. You may be accessing your scanner through Acrobat, but HP is literally taking its cut from your page.

Hypothesis 2 — Your HP scanner may do a better job scanning 8 ½ x 11 letter pages if you use the document feeder and HP scanner/driver/conversion to PDF. HP MFP scanners — ain’t that a mouthful — overrides the autocrop for live content when you use the scanner document feeder and HP’s own scanner utility to give you the full page you scan. HP scanner drivers use their own process for converting scanned page images into PDFs, and using that utility will offer you all the features you asked for in Acrobat short of PDF/A-1b compliance. And you can fix that discrepancy easily within Acrobat.

It will take a couple of extra steps to use the HP driver to define your PDF files and then open them in Acrobat to refine them, but I suspect you’ll get better results if you do.

Hope this helps,

Randy

Randy Hagan · Answer

How are you scanning your documents? What device(s) are you using to scan page(s)? What settings, if any, are you entering to getPDF output from your scanner(s)? Is your scanning device automatically saving PDFs from the scans, or are you using saved pixel files and converting them into PDFs yourself? Is your scanner using Adobe Acrobat to create your PDFs from scans? Or is it using a third-party utility to create PDF pages?

We’d like to help, but we need a lot more information to figure out your situation and how best to help you. If you could provide the answers to these questions, it would help us a lot in helping you past your issues.

Randy

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