Discarding cropped areas of pages

[joshweiland]

I am taking PDFs of documents made for printing and reformatting them & compressing them to be downloadable PDFs on our website.

This requires cropping some pages manually using the crop tool.  I then use the PDF Optimizer to compress the file into a web suitable file size.

I just realized that cropping a page DOES NOT discard the content outside of the crop. Even after using PDF Optimizer or Reduce File Size, the content outside of the crop still remains. Anyone with Acrobat can remove the crop or change the crop.

I'm trying to create PDFs with the smallest file size possible, so it's silly to keep the content outside of the crop. Is there a way to discard this content?

[ThreeOneEightFourTwo]

That link is archived in the Internet Archive. Here's a snapshot from 2009: https://web.archive.org/web/20190124162549/http://www.proficiografik.com/2009/11/17/acrobat-9-when-t...

The link to the fixup still works.

[OsakaWebbie]

Nice detective work. I downloaded, imported, and ran that 2009 fixup, and it does appear to do what it says even in 2024.

However, I was surprised to discover that the file size didn't change as much as I expected. In my case (something I do quarterly), I have a four-page A4 newsletter that I build as two A3 pages for printing, then I want to upload it to our website as a four-page PDF. So I export from InDesign as pages "1,2,2,1" and then crop half off each of those pages. Since all the content is duplicated (including images) and then half is cropped away and then removed by the fixup, I expected the file size to drop close to half. But it merely reduced from 670kB to 649kB. Hmm...

[Eli6C13]

If you use the "Recognize Text" tool after cropping, all area outside of the cropped region is disgarded as part of the recognition process. Also recognizing text usually reduces size in its own right so might help if the idea is to reduce file size.

This is a fix and not a solution, but wanted to post.