Crop PDF pages

[community_help]

This question was posted in response to the following article: http://help.adobe.com/en_US/acrobat/using/WS546948FF-6085-4b14-8640-D9EDE30AD8CB.w.html

[Steve Werner]

I looked in the Keyboard Shortcut section of the Acrobat XI Help PDF and I could not find a shortcut.

[too_often]

I agree with ecstatic design. Ctrl-Shift-T was much easier to use than the current method. I don't do it everyday but it was simple. It was also directly on the menu so if you forgot it (or were using it for the first time) it was easily accessible.

Acrobat XI Pro has taken a huge step backwards with the significant reduction in the menu, making it now impossible to accomplish many tasks without the use of the mouse. As for cropping or resizing pages it is now completely counter-intuitive and I have had to hunt on the internet more than once to remember how to do it. Even a slow moving mouse user might never find the Set Page Boxes dialogue.

Put it back on the top menu, Adobe, and give me my shortcut keystroke back!

[Bill12]

As mentioned, Acrobat now offers it through a single key selection. To activate the single key selection, follow the manual instructions given as "To enable single-key shortcuts, open the Preferences dialog box, and under General, select the Use Single-Key Accelerators To Access Tools option."

[JustBob]

When I try this in Acrobat XI, Acrobat crops the page to whatever size I originally drew my crop box to. If I choose Trim from the Margin Control > Apply To pop-up box, Acrobat still crops thae page to whatever size I had crawn the cop box in Acrobat to. How, really how, do I get Acrobat to crop the page to eliminage the crop marks?

[24pro]

Yes - JustBob are correct. I have had this problem for years and this is really annoying. I does not work as Steve Werner says. The only way to crop the page is to draw the area manually. There seems to be no answer to this or am I wrong?

[adwul62]

Up front: I am a newbie and am (still) using XI Pro as a trial. That said, I do feel that matters around margins, papersize, in all the different window panels, they are a bit confusing to me. Maybe the number of questions asked on Internet regarding margins, will make Adobe to address this and make this a little bit more userfriendly.

Example: I have a document with size of 178,2 x 97,4mm (File->Print->tag Custom Scale 100&).

By default, Acrobat selects "Auto portrait/landscape" (under Orientation) and displays the print as Landscape.

If I change this to Portrait, the preview shows the text in the utmost left top corner, well into the 'grey borders'...?

Is that correct? I can't adjust the margins here.

Personally, I would like to have two print-profiles:

1. where nothing is being shrinked as long as it fits on a document with 'my margings'

(e.g. left 15mm width required to punch holes, right 10mm, top and bottom 10mm)

2. where documents may be shrinked with margins set a 0mm all around

Donot know how to 'set this as default'.

Secondly, File->Print->Select Printer:Adobe PDF ->Click on Proporties button, right of Adobe PDF,

then click on "Edit" right of Default Settings - under default page size it says:

Papersize is set to 215,9 x 279,4

ISO Standard is 210 × 297

i.e. papersize is 5.9mm wider x 17.6mm higher that the ISO size.

Anyway, does anybody know how to create these custom print profiles ?

Windows 7 x64

Acrobat Pro XI

Printer: HP 3800dn

Thanks

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[Test Screen Name]

adwul62, I don't think you are talking about the same thing as everyone else in this thread. This is about the crop tool in Acrobat.

You are asking something about printing. Not sure though, are you talking about PRINTING TO PDF (with the Adobe PDF printer, which you mention)? Or are you talking about Printing FROM PRINT (print in Acrobat, to your own printer, which you also mention)? Perhaps we can provide clarity. Acrobat has really very little indeed to do with margins (it isn't Word and is less like Word than many people realise), and by focussing on margins you may be going down the wrong path for understanding.

[adwul62]

Hello to you,

Sorry, I am not sure how I got here, but likely I used F1 from within Acrobat and did a search on "set margins in acrobat" and more or less took the first hit

-

Adobe Acrobat XI * Crop PDF pages

Choose Tools > Print Production > Set Page Boxes. Under Margin Controls,

select Remove White Margins. To remove ...

-

Anyway, what I want is, for both options, i.e. either print a PDF to printer, or print to PDF (and creating a PDF doc thát way), I'd like to have:

1)  with custom margin, e.g. left 15mm

2) without margins, i.e. set to '0'

3) set either one of them as default.

I've tried to figure this out thru preferences, think there is nothing and then went on to search via Google and F1 help.

Am afraid I donot know how to sort this out.

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[Test Screen Name]

It is almost always better to start a new question than jump into another, because everyone gets confused. And the original poster, who is now getting emails unrelated to their question, is not helped... Anyway, here we are.

When you're learning Acrobat, you probably need to learn what it does rather than determine it needs to work as you wish; the clash can be frustrating and Acrobat usually wins. Acrobat is a very large program with many options some of which only a few people in the world understand, so learning is most frustrating for people who want to be thorough, unfortunately.

There are no custom margins when you print a PDF. There might be custom margins when you print TO PDF..

Some convenient definitions of things that aren't really margins:

"printer margins". Most printers can't print to the edge of the paper, they have an unprintable area at the edges. Often this space is not the same all round. Often, especially for inkjets there is an unprintable edge at the bottom of 12 mm or more.

"PDF margins". PDFs have no concept of margins, but this is simply used to conveniently talk about the white space at the edge of the PDF (if any).

When you print FROM Acrobat, the following applies:

You can choose page scaling options. Key options are

None - there is no scaling, the PDF is printed at its precise size. If the PDF size and paper size happen to be the same, then the PDF is put directly to fill the paper. If the PDF's margins are larger than the printer margins, all is well. Otherwise one or more edges of the PDF are cut off.

Fit to printable area  - the PDF page is shrunk or enlarged to fit neatly inside the printer margins. You see margins on the printed page which are the combination of the printer margins and scaled PDF margins.

When you print TO PDF, Acrobat offers no margin options. But the application you print FROM might have margin options.

[adwul62]

Thank you so much!

You are right, the original poster may be getting unrelated updates.

In case of need, I will create a new thread on this.

Again, many thanks to your elabrate reply.

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[colin_pangolin]

Using Adobe Acrobat 9,

1. Create a temporary folder, place the pdf to be cropped there

2. Crop the file using Adobe Acrobat

3. Open the Adobe cropped pdf file

4. Select File -> Export -> Image -> PNG

5. Click "Save"

6. Go into the temporary folder, select all the PNG files, right click select "Combine supported files in Acrobat"

7. Click "Combine files"

8. Save the newly combined file.  This file has is permanently cropped and is of the same quality as the original

[Bernd Alheit]

This way you will lost all bookmarks, links, and so on

[maximus68]

Bernd Alheit

You're absolutely right. This is not a solution.

I invite you to visit this website:

http://www.proficiografik.com/2009/11/17/acrobat-9-when-the-crop-tool-is-not-cropping-and-how-to-fix...

Another thing:

To fine-fixing crop window we must enter values in the edit boxes Top Bottom Left Right.

It would be much easier to operate with crop window and drag it in different positions as other programs allow this.

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[shawninvancouver]

I just posted this on another page.... obviously expressing my frustration that Adobe forces one to jump through hoops in order to permanently remove cropped content but also because of the shear number of Adobe users that give the wrong advice on how to properly do this.

So... PERMANENTLY REMOVING CROPPED CONTENT FROM A PDF

First, this situation is a royal PITA! It needs to be easier to perform a permanent crop. I've been hit by this way too many times. At the very least, I wish Adobe InDesign obeyed the PDF crop settings! When I import a cropped PDF into InDesign (and I forgot to engage a permanent crop)... sure enough, all that cropped just is still there!  

Every time I really get annoyed about this, I blast off a surprisingly polite feature request to Adobe but we all know where those feature requests go..... I digress...

So how the heck do you actually permanently remove PDF crops?

Here are the ANNOYING steps required (as of Adobe v11.0)

1. Select All Tools > Print Production > Preflight.
2. In Preflight, select Select Single Fixups (it is a wrench symbol).
3. Select Permanent Crop.
4. Click Fix (another stupid wrench in the lower right corner of the Preflight window.
5. Supply a new file name because Adobe won't allow you to overwrite the already opened file, silly person!
6. REPEAT for every single eff'n PDF you need to fix!  Oh... you might occasionally encounter a failed write... just do it again and this time you can overwrite the failed write file.

Bloody annoying but that seems to be the only way to do this!  Can this workflow be automated?... like the moment I do the frig'n crop I just want to save sans the cropped baggage! 

MSG to ADOBE! I do my own backups, thank you. If I want to crop something out, that means I no longer want what I have cropped out!

Okay done... hopefully I have helped someone.

[JustBob]

That's very good Shawn! Thank you!

Now, I see things are a bit different in Acrobat DC. Your hint about the wrench is invaluable. I think the command is now called "Set CropBox to TrimBox", as far as I can tell.

[Test Screen Name]

You may want "crop" to do that but by design that isn't what it does. It has always been a reversible action, for better or worse, so you need something beyond "crop" if you want to discard stuff. It also gets very complicated when you crop something with bleed, because there are two different boxes, neither one necessarily the crop box, for the bleed interior and exterior. Prepress apps tend to use the crop info (trim box and bleed box) by design, which is why Acrobat can set these boxes from "crop pages" - though not in a very intuitive way. Basically, understanding the effect and importance of the FIVE boxes a PDF page might have will make your life easier.

If your only concern is PDF import to InDesign, can't you just set suitable "Crop To" choices in the Import Options?

[Walking_Jew2]

I have bad news for you... if you import the final pdf in photoshop, and click on "images" instead of "pages".... YES. they cropped stuff is still there.

Gosh.

[clemensR]

Thank you, it works perfectly. I really have to get familiar with the new interface!

[Asher@]

Thanks for this post, I finally find out how to crop a PDF in Adobe...That's pretty easy.