Discarding cropped areas of pages

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.

I'm still running Adobe Acrobat 9.0, and the inability to truly delete cropped areas of the document was maddening.

The download link in the marked answer no longer functions, but I found that I was able to "Print to PDF" using a custom page size that matches my cropped area and that appears to have created a new PDF with no extraneous information.

Absolutely baffling that the option to delete cropped data wasn't natively present.

I found a way just now after so many hours. Download a afree MacOS or iOS app "GoodNotes". Drop a cropped PDF to GoodNotes files (not in another notebook's page), import it as a new file.  Then export it back as PDF. After the internal processing and export in GoodNotes it will be saved loslessly (the vector graphics and pictures are preserved s is) as cropped with the same cropped dimensions. 

Not quite sure why this wasnt updated anywhere, but the new acrobat version as of 2023, you go to your tools and pres print production and then press set pages boxes... then press constrain page proportions then press ok

Folks commenting about newer versions have it right. Protect>Remove Hidden Information pops open a dialogue with the option to remove "Deleted or cropped content." Simple and built in.

maplekiwi, your steps set the crop box, but they do not disacard any information, so this isn't a solution to the original problem (though it might be that your needs are different and that's fine for you).

Will @Adobe ever give us an answer to this? People have been asking this question for six years. I remove hidden content outside the cropbox area and by PDF goes from ~40MB to ~850MB. This is using the Remove Hidden Information feature. How is that even possible??

Please, answer? Fix?

I have a solution — it's the some solution mentioned already. (Preflight fixup to remove items outside Trim.)

I found this page because I'm having a unique (related) problem. This solution works flawlessly on a Mac. It's corrupting the other objects on the page in Windows, however.

Assuming you're working in a prepress environment, and you're exporting PDFs out of InDesign with Bleed and Crop and Registration marks: The stock fixup, "Remove page objects which are completely outside of page area," does not work, as it is set to remove objects outside the Media box. (If your PDF has a Media box that is defined as the Trim box or that is indeed your page bounds, then this fixup may work for you.) You need to create a new one.

You can duplicate it, and click on Edit and change "Completely outside:" from Media box to Trim box.

And yes, you can also create a fixup to automatically set the Crop (or Media) box to the Trim box. You can even make one that combines these fixups. I have, and as I said, it works without issue — on a Mac.

I've distributed it to coworkers who are using the same version of Acrobat (X/10) on Windows, and it does what it's supposed to, only something gets corrupted. It's like the first 4 or 5 lines have the leading set to 0, and they all munge up together on one line.

Removing just objects outside Bleed doesn't create this issue. But, as the Bleed sometimes contains sensitive info (slugs), I want to remove these.

Has anyone else seen this, and can anyone offer any suggestions?

In case this is not so late as to be useless, a little javascript seems to be the best tool for this job. I struggled with preflight and other options (such as sanitize and remove hidden information and PDF optimize), none of which set the media box (i.e. the whole page area, similar to the pasteboard in InD) to the crop box. This did the trick -

for (var p=0; p<this.numPages; p++) {
  this.setPageBoxes({cBox: "Media", nStart: p, nEnd: p, rBox: (this.getPageBox ("Crop", p))});
  }

This can be established as a function and then called from an action or a menu item, or this "raw" js can be used in a custom action.

I am more or less totally ignorant of js, so creating an interface to select isolated page numbers to run the get and set PageBox(es) functions is well beyond me. Of course one could simply use a single line to run it on the current page, simply substituting for p whatever the code is for the current page (I think it's this.PageNum):

 this.setPageBoxes({cBox: "Media", nStart: p, nEnd: p, rBox: (this.getPageBox ("Crop", p))});

Hope this is helpful to someone. It solved a major problem for us creating ebook covers from traditional cover spreads and deleting the leftover spine and non-used cover content.