Centering text and deleting unwanted markings in a PDF page

I have the same problem. There is a solution but it is complicated and time consuming.

Unwanted blemishes can be covered by a blank Text Box. Set the default properties to give a border colour of white. When you have finished export all the pages as images (jpeg or tif or whatever take your fancy) and then import into a new document.

Centring text is more complex and requires a copy of Word or similar. First perform OCR on the entire document to ensure that all the pages are correctly orientated.

Use the crop pages tool (Document, crop pages or shift+ctrl+T) to alter the appropriate margin until the text is visually in the horizontal centre of the page. Do not worry about the actual width this is corrected later. At the end of the process you will have a set of pages all different widths which looks absolutely awful. Nil desporandum this is only an interim stage.

Export all the pages to images. Then go to word and set up a document (file, page set up) with the same page size as your original paper document with no margins no headers and no footers (ignore all error messages which will try to persuade you to correct the apparent error). Set the justification to centre, then import all the image files into a single word document, word will ensure that all the images fit the page but beware word often puts the last image first and you will have to manually correct this. Finally save the document before converting it to pdf. You will now have a document which looks like the original but with the text centred on the page.

Now convert to Adobe pdf and again perform OCR on the resulting document. Voila perfect cantered text with every page the same size.

All the above assumes that you have white margins to your text or pictures.

There has to be an easier way!

This is such a common occurrence that I feel Adobe must have a solution somewhere which would automatically solve the problem which after all is much less computationally complex than OCR.

basic tips: scan to an image editing app like Photoshop Elements; adjust, clean resize to taste, etc.; save as PDF. open in Acrobat; reduce file size, if desired.

Hi,
If one must have 100% artistic/editorial control of layout-format-contents in PDF then the most efficient method is to key the content into one's word processor or page layout application using the desired template. Once done, convert to PDF.

If you don't want to do that and you've image files to clean up what Reid states

will assure you've optimized the images prior to converting to PDF.
Typically, upfront staging results in much less work later.

Another scenerio is that, for whatever reason, neither of the two approaches above is practicable then, with appropriate configuration of Acrobat, much in the way of clean up/optimizing can be done with Acrobat.

Start by viewing David Mankin's On Demand eSeminar -
[url=http://adobechats.adobe.com.acrobat.com/p49554903/]"Scanning and OCR"[/url]

After viewing, visit Acrobat Help to review the details of Acrobat's "Optimize Scanned PDF".
Become familiar with "deskew", "background removal", edge shadkow removal", "despeckle", and "halo removal" (filtering settings).

For a PDF containing a scanned image look over [b]Document > Optimize Scanned PDF[/b]For configuration of Acrobat in support of pending scan jobs look over
[b]File > Create Pdf > From Scanner[/b]
In the "Acrobat Scan" dialog, click the "Options" button in the 'Optimization' pane.
You can configure image compression and filtering values.

Be well...