Crop tool is resizing when it shouldn't

[mollykitti]

Not that I don't know Excel, but the spreadsheet I'm trying to create would take years to format correctly.  I found a free program online that sets it up for me and returns a .pdf of the spreadsheet. Yay, time saved.  Except the .pdf returned has one column on an extra page.  No biggie, I can crop and line up the sheet in photoshop so everything's on one page, right?  The first several pages worked that way just fine.  After that, when I cropped the pages, they didn't line up.  The extra line was quite a few rows taller than the main chart.  There are the same number of cells on each side, but one has clearly been resized.  I tried to manually resize one side, but as soon as I merge the layers it reverts back to being uneven.  What am I doing differently/wrong?

[Zaid Al Hilali]

This is not an answer to your question, but why you chose Photoshop to fix a PDF by cropping extra column, what will you be saving cropped page as?

[mollykitti]

I've been saving them as .psd and .pdf .  I'm using photoshop to align the extra column with the original columns.

[postrophe]

Hi

I found a free program online that sets it up for me and returns a .pdf of the spreadsheet.

You should contact the plugin developper, no ?

Pierre

[mollykitti]

I tried, but so far no response.

[D Fosse]

Photoshop will rasterize the content, so it will no longer be editable (or copy-able) text. It will effectively turn the whole thing into an image.

Just so you know.

(...unless someone knows of a nifty workaround to prevent that...this isn't something I ever do).

[Zaid Al Hilali]

If I were mollykitti​ I'd drop Photoshop out of this workflow and try to finish my plan in Excel or Acrobat Pro.

Back to Molly's question, I couldn't figure out why crop tool misbehaves after several pages!

[mollykitti]

I can't work in Excel, I don't have access to the spreadsheet - just the .pdf.  If I started a new Excel sheet, it would take years to set up.  The free program I found cuts out that time, but I have no idea how the software works, so I can't recreate the process myself.  I've tried contacting the developer, but the last response on his forum is two years old, I don't think he checks it any more.

As for Acrobat, I know how to crop, but as far as I know, there's no way to then line up and merge the two cropped pages.  I'm also dropping a semi-transparent layer behind the chart.  I think Photoshop would be the most efficient way to do this, yes?

[mollykitti]

I don't need to edit the text because there is none - symbols only (also, the .pdf is flattened before it even gets to me).  Rasterized is completely fine.  It's a color chart interpretation of an image of an image.  I just would like to not have one random column on a next page.

[Eternal Warrior]

If using Acrobat Pro/DC I have found you can still edit text and frames etc even after using photoshop... Don't know if this helps... I think I had the preserve layers feature turned on though..

[jane-e]

1. Excel (Best)

Go to Page Setup > Fit to > 1 page wide by X pages tall

2. Acrobat

Crop tool > drag crop area > double-click inside to get dialog to fine tune

3. Photoshop (Worst)

Right-click tool in the options bar and Reset your Crop tool to its defaults. Try again.

[mollykitti]

I answered most of this above, but basically, I don't HAVE the Excel sheet (otherwise, yes, resetting the page size is easy).  I tried the "Reset All Tools" option as well.  It didn't work.  I had some luck today using "paste in place".  I'm 100% sure I didn't use that on the first 18 pages that worked just fine, but it seems to work about half the time on the pages that don't want to line up.  I'm going to try and post some pics of my process, so everybody has an idea of my end goal.

[mollykitti]

This is how it's supposed to look:

Here's how it gets to me (sort of, I already swapped out the numerical scales as Excel notation was just too busy):

As you can see, there's a ton of wasted border space, and really no reason to have that last bit on the next page.

Here they are cropped:

and lined up, except not:

Not sure why only some pages aren't lining up.

[jane-e]

Thank you for the pictures! I think we were all imagining a spreadsheet (I was).

Just to check, go to File > Properties > Description and check the Page Size for the troublesome pages. Are they the same? You can also get this by moving your cursor to the lowest left hand corner of the screen.

[mollykitti]

They are all the same page size, they were pages of the same document originally.  The ones that worked were in the first 36 pages, the ones that didn't were later.  I don't recognize the size, I believe it's European.  The pages that worked I did one day, the ones that didn't I did the next day.  That's why I'm thinking I changed the exact procedure from one day to the next.  I just can't figure out what I changed.

[jane-e]

To test, then, if you re-do an earlier page, does it work as expected or does it mess up?

What is your workflow? Maybe we can help with that to see why the one is coming in bigger. Are you doing one image (made of two parts) at a time?

[mollykitti]

I put the project in time out for a few days, and then came back to it.  It worked just fine.  Funny how often that seems to work.  Still don't know what I was doing wrong those few days.