How to split A3 scanned pdf into A4, split down middle?

[jt77474]

To save time I scanned part of a book two pages at once, in landscape A3 (UK paper size). I now want to split it down the middle so each page is separate, in A4 portrait.

What's the easiest way to do this? I have acrobat pro extended at my university.

If I could duplicate each page then I could crop the evens one way and the odds the other, but I can't find a way to duplicate each page.

If someone can tell me how to do this (must be extremely common) job  I'd be very happy. Thanks

[jt77474]

I've realised that if I can duplicate each page in the document then it will be easy to apply a crop to all the odd pages, and the opposite crop to all the even pages. Short of pressing the scan button twice for each page, how can I duplicate every page in a pdf, so the order would go from:

page1

page2

page3

etc

to

page1

page1

page2

page2

page3

page3

etc

So that each page appears twice? This is a pain to do manually for large documents. Please share some wisdom with me, Thanks

[jt77474]

I found a solution, no thanks to this forum community I'm afraid.

1 - export pdf to image, one tif for each page

2 - copy and paste each tif in windows explorer, so that you now have duplicates of each page. They should appear in the right order:

page 1

page 1copy

page 2

page 2copy

etc

3 - create pdf by combining files in acrobat pro. make sure you drag the list of files in the CORRECT order, ie don't resort by date

4 - you now have duplicates for each double page. Crop them from the right for the odd pages, and from the left from the even pages

5 - compress the file to discard the cropped out regions

problem solved. Still would be nice if adobe offered an easier way to do this though

[Bill12]

You should be able to do what you want with JavaScript. I would suggest you check with the Scripting forum as to the process needed. Keep in mind that with the crop you are suggesting, the rest of the page is still there. You could print the combined file to a new PDF or try some of the other redax options (I really don't know much about the redax options) to eliminate the cropped part.

[jt77474]

Thank you.

Yes, I've noticed all the crop data is STILL there, even after a resave. I tried the inspect document to remove cropped regions but that didn't work either. How do I permanently remove the unwanted crop regions from a pdf? Baffling

[Bill12]

It used to be that Reduce File Size would delete the cropping, but it does not do that anymore. I think that one of the redax functions will do it, but as I said I am not that familiar with redax. There may also be a preflight option to remove the cropped areas. As I mentioned, the simple, but not elegant, way to remove cropping is to print to a new PDF file.

[Peter Kleinheider]

You can use Acrobat's Preflight tool and its fixup funtionality to perform the needed tasks.

1. Create a fixup that sets the dimension of the MediaBox to the dimension of the CropBox (Fixup name: set page geometry boxes)

2. Create a fixup that removes all the objects outside the CropBox (Fixup name: Remove page objects outside page area)

Now run these fixups or create a preflight profile to combine those.

Cheers,

Peter Kleinheider

inpetto premedia consulting

[jt77474]

Thank you. I found a preflight profile to do just that, but amazingly the file size remained the same! And the page didn't rapidly speed up when viewing.

I didn't realise acrobat was quite so useless for cropping documents and exporting the cropped version. You're supposed to be able to delete non visible portions using the remove tool in the 'examine document' function but that doesn't work either.

The only way to do it properly is to edit the images before turning them into pdf, usually in photoshop.

Printing to a new PDF is no good because of paper size and interpolation, so my very economical bitmap scans become interpolated greyscale, with large file sizes.

So, in short, if you think acrobat pro is a good tool to edit your pdf think again! It's utterly hopeless.

I just can't believe there's not a tool to split a page in half down the middle, many people must do what I do, which is to scan two pages at once and then cut them in half. Very, very disappointed with adobe.

[JacobCB]

Hi everyone,

I hope by now you've discovered Briss http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ 

It was designed to do this specifically and is flawlessly fast and easy.  It would be a nightmare to use any of the methods described above.