Cropping PDF page doesn't crop the canvas entirely

[Tharald]

When I crop a page in Adobe Acrobat Pro, the page seems to be cropped correctly, and displays the way I intend in Acrobat.

However, the preview of the file in Windows Explorer shows the cropped part displayed on a white canvas of the same size as the original page. It looks similar to an image layer in PhotoShop in a canvas that's larger than the layer itself.

This is not a problem in any PDF reader I have tested, but I use a software for extracting images from PDFs. In those images, the crop section is displayed on a white canvas the same size as the original page.

I have been looking through settings in Acrobat Pro to find if there is any way of cropping the entire page information, stripping away all info about the original image size, but I have not succeeded.

Does anyone know of a solution here?

(Icon preview in Windows showing a cropped page on a white background the same size as the original page)

[JR Boulay]

Make sure that the software you are using recognizes the correct Box, the one you are using to crop.

To know everything about the PDF page boxes: https://www.prepressure.com/pdf/basics/page-boxes

[Luke Jennings3]

I believe cropping in Acrobat is always non-destructive, that is, it can be reversed. Changing the crop, trim, bleed, media or art box sizes will not remove the cropped content. You can use a preflight profile to remove content outside of a specific box, but if an image is partly in the box, the cropped section won't be removed. The Redact tool- Sanitize Document- Remove cropped or hidden areas seems to work in Acrobat, but the hidden content will stubbornly reappear when the pdf is placed in InDesign (at least it does when I test it), so your image extraction software will probably also see the cropped area.

One way to permanently remove the cropped area would be to place the pdf into an Indesign (or Illustrator) page at the desired size and export to a new pdf.

[Tharald]

Thank you both for the help! I was unaware that cropping is non-destructive, and I was able to fix the problem by letting the other program take crop boxes into account when generating images 🙂