How does one crop the size of the PDF to the size of it's background image?

Question

Basically I sorta have a good idea on what general cropping is like, even disabled the default "snap to grid" nonsense, however I cannot see myself acheiving much progress effeciently by needing to spend 2-3 minutes manually, and painstakingly cropping to the edges of a scan (which serves as the background image in question)-- and I can't even imagine the frustration I'd have then realizing that I may or may've not screwed up on consistency when it comes to said PDF size being wrong, or it being correct but cutting off the scans.

Is there either a pixel perfect grid I can select, or at the very least be able to crop the PDF down to the scan? Given that this is seemingly the only way I can export PDFs from xhtml files, I can't seem to find any other way to adjust the size. A screenshot of this dilema will be provided below. Any and all help is greatly appreciated!

gary_sc · Accepted Answer

Hi, @MusicalCervid, thanks for the additional information.

Is there a reason why that extra "border" is not desirable or acceptable to you? Not sure if this makes a difference to you, but when it comes with extra empty space, it does make a difference if that space is a bitmap of white pixels or if it's transparent pixels. If it is the former, then that can increase the storage size of each page. If the region is transparent, then no extra storage space has been created.

[When I scan a document as a TIF image @ 300 ppi), it can easily be 8–9 MB in size. Once I OCR it and delete all excess pixels, it can easily be down to 80–120 kb, depending on the amount of text on a page.]

FWIW, you might try Print Friendly, as it has given me the best success in converting web pages to PDF. It is not 100% great on all websites, but it certainly is much better than any other web-to-PDF mechanism I've found. However, I've never had web page issues that you're dealing with, so I've no idea what or how it might work there.

Good luck!

gary_sc · Answer

Hi, @MusicalCervid, it's a good thing I looked at your screenshot because at first, I thought you were talking about needing to crop AFTER a scan, but then I see that you were getting these pages from a website. When you PDF a web page, you are getting what they get. There's not much you can do about that. One thing you can look for is if there is a "Print" icon within the website or on the page (I do not see that in your screenshot). If they do have that, it means that the web designer built into the page/website the code to properly save out the PDFs at a proper page size (USA letting, A4, etc.).

Also, you do not mention if you are doing "Save as PDF…", or as "Save as Adobe PDF…." The latter is using Adobe Acrobat's engine to do the PDF creation, while the former is using your operating system to do the PDF creation.

Lastly, one of the best 3rd party applications I've found for converting web pages into PDFs is from "Print Friendly." (google it).

Nonetheless, I am unaware of any feature within Acrobat Standard or Pro that can detect a page edge from within a page and bring it down to the page size you wish. You can get it to crop a page to a specific size, but not based on a given page size/edge.

Sorry,

And please let me know if you are referring to a scan of these documents and they are not from a website.

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