Discarding cropped area with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2018

[11marini]

So I know this is a semi-popular subject, but I still have yet to find anything which works. So I do a lot of scanning (sheet music) and I process those scans with Adobe Acrobat Pro DC (2018). The music is often larger than A4, so I scan it as A3 and crop it. Obviously, the info that has been cropped away is still there, hence why the file size does not change. I would like to discard the invisible information after the crop (and therefore enjoy a smaller file size), but I have yet to be able to figure this out. I have tried a various combination of Preflight tools, I have tried "Remove Hidden Information" (via the Protect menu) and "Sanitize" (via the Redact menu), both of which balloon the file size. I have also tried the Proficiografik Fixup, which doesn't work either.

The only options I can see are refrying it (which is obviously a bad idea), or simply exporting it as an image, cropping that, and putting it back together with Acrobat (stupidly work-intensive, albeit very effective and yielding a desirable file size).

Can anyone put me out of my misery and help me solve this? Thanks in advance for any help or ideas!

[try67]

This (paid-for) tool I've developed does just that: Custom-made Adobe Scripts: Acrobat -- Remove Everything Outside the Trim/Crop/Bleed/Art Box

[11marini]

Thanks for the reply. I am aware of this tool, but I am wary to drop money on something I'm not sure even works. And while I appreciate the desire to make money off of one's own hard work, I find it hard to believe that this isn't built in somewhere, albeit buried deep in the bowels of the program...

[Dov Isaacs]

11marini,

On behalf of Adobe …

There is absolutely no feature “built in somewhere, albeit buried deep in the bowels of the program” that can remove portions of images (or any other object) on a page that extend outside of the Trim, Crop, Bleed, or Art Boxes. Using Acrobat Pro DC's Preflight fixups, you can remove object that totally lie outside of the boxes, but there is no functionality to truncate objects that transcend the box borders. I personally cannot vouch for try67's tool, but there is nothing for free within Acrobat that does what you need, fully cropping the actual image on a page eliminating the pixels outside the boxes from the PDF file's contents.

FWIW, your use case is totally valid, but currently the only method of accomplishing what you want is to scan independently of Acrobat, crop the page the way you want/need it, and then import that into Acrobat. Yeah, that's a lot of extra work.

Since what you want to do is not uncommon in terms of requests I heard from users, I would recommend that you go to Acrobat for Windows and Mac: Top (2613 ideas) – Share your feedback on Acrobat DC  and put in a request for this type of feature as an additional Preflight fixup.

          - Dov

[11marini]

Thank you for the prompt and very complete reply. This is yet again another reason why I feel validated to be sceptical of a paid tool with no way of trying it first....

I'll put in a request as you suggested. Thanks again!

[Bernd Alheit]

Can't you scan with a custom size?

[11marini]

Unfortunately not. And sometimes the scans have very irregular margins, so pinpointing the exact dimensions at the time of scanning would add a huge amount of time to the scanning process. The scanning/cropping part works as I want it to (a desirable balance of speed vs. accuracy), but I need to remove the unnecessary parts....

[Bernd Alheit]

You can redact the parts outside the crop box.

[11marini]

That does not work. The canvas is still there, and therefore the filesize remains the same. Already tried with the Sanitize function, as mentioned in my original post.

[try67]

Well, my tool does that, basically. It redacts what's outside of the selected box. So if that doesn't work for you then it won't, either.

That's not the same as what the Sanitize tool does, though.

[11marini]

I admit that I don't use the Redact functionality almost at all (outside of this testing). My Redact toolbar has only "Mark for Redaction", "Apply", "Properties", "Remove Hidden Information", and "Sanitize Document". I tried the last two, and while the information is removed, the original page size is retained (I can see it from the "Crop Pages" dialog), and the file size balloons. Contrasted with if I export TIFFs and recombine them with Adobe, then the file size gets cut in half. The main thing which doesn't work for me is the file size.

[Bernd Alheit]

Try "Mark for Redaction" and "Apply".

[11marini · Accepted solution]

Seeing as, per Dov Isaacs' response, there is no clean way to do this, the easiest way that I can suggest without a degradation of quality is to crop as needed, export to TIFF, and make a fresh PDF from the TIFFs.

[Minilena]

I use the Print as PDF-function, and it appears to be working! I'm as baffled as you are that there isn't a 'true' function for it however...

[kenh734041]

Warning! There may be a serious BUG in Preflight (or Document > Examine Document > Hidden Text), depending on the version of Acrobat Pro. (I have Pro 8, and could not afford buying another new one). When check "Hidden Text", it will convert all multiple hyphens or multiple underscores into blanks. This is particularly true, when you "print" a cropped PDF to another PDF to remove stuff left outside of the cropped pages.

Microsoft Word can convert multiple hyphens (dashes) or underscores into longer dashes or underlines. But "Hidden Text", if checked, will threat them as hidden and removed - leaving blanks in the document. This is a quite serious BUG. Please confirm whether this happens to your versions of Acrobat Pro.

[n.hull]

I crop and then run OCR process - which removes the part of the page which is outside the visible border. 

[KWKloeber]

TExt Recognition removed the cropped page -- it went from letter size to the cropped size.  Of course you cannot OCR a page with rendered text already on it.  I had added a txt note, so I needed to remove that before I ran OCR.  Odd thing though, it ended up back on my OCR'd page (so I was good to go.)  Why?  Who knows, that's Adobe for yah!