Can't crop page size (for Lulu upload)

I use an earlier version of Acrobat and I believe you have the same facility. If you go to file, document properties, open options, select single page and a percent.
Look at what you have saved using adobe reader. If it looks too big, lower the percent. That should work for you

But I'm trying to crop the page (remove the outer part of the page). I don't just want to shrink it. The area that I want to print is the right size, but it's only part of the page. The page has a margin all around, which includes printers marks and white space. The printable area is just the right size. It's the margins which enlarge the page so that it's too big. I need to crop the page (delete the white space and the printers marks), then save the reduced area.

(I'm not just trying to keep everything on the page but shrink it all to make it smaller.)

Any further ideas?

Thank.s

omccreary,

I hope you get this message. I am having the exact same problem that you described and I was wondering what you did to fix it.

The 'crop pages' tool in Acrobat does not change the base page size (called the mediabox) - it simply moves the print 'soft' boxes (trim, bleed, crop) to hide parts of the document from view. A modern printer should read the soft boxes when printing a PDF.

Lulu, however, has very dumb printing technology and only checks the mediabox entry for files you upload, so will see nothing different. Some plugins allow destructive trimming (changing the mediabox and removing content outside it), or you could re-distill the PDF into a new file with the correct page size.

I've little run-time with the manipulation of PDFs in context of the ArtBox, TrimBox, etc.
So, the following is more a suggestion from a glimmer of an idea than a
"do this - it works". With that said perhaps the functionality options available in the
Crop Pages dialog window may be a way to adjust the size of the "boxes" that a
PDF is made up of.

From the Acrobat Help -
Search on "crop pages" and select topic "Crop pages".
Five sub-topics are there for reading.
One item caught my attention.

This, in context of the full discussion provided by the five sub-topics and
Acrobat 8 Professional's "Examine Document" feature for examining/removing
hidden content may be worth playing with.
Specifically -

If UVSAR, jon.bessant, et al. see this & care to share their thoughts on this I'd certainly appreciate that.Be well...

Well, I printed the file from Adobe Acrobat to Adobe Acrobat.

It's like taking a picture of a picture.

But it worked.

I can't tell if the quality worsened. It seems like it should have.

daka630 - no, it doesn't work. It LOOKS like it does, but if you preflight the document after running Examine.. remove hidden you'll see the mediabox is still the same. Not only that, but depending on how the page is laid out, you will [i]still have content in the hidden area[/i]. Go back to print proc/crop and you'll see the margins are now non-zero; and in the thumbnail you'll often find stray bits of text, etc. as Acrobat takes that Examine.. request to mean "delete all elements that are entirely within the hidden area". If something is partially in and partially out, it's kept intact. Acrobat doesn't do splitting of text boxes.

The problem is that the mediabox is where all the page elements get their origin, so if you crop it away from (0,0) you have to change the (x,y) location of everything else in the PDF to match. That's possible (and some of the Pitstop plugins do it) but Acrobat won't. It's why crop pages is in the "print production" submenu, rather than "document processing" - it's purely a fiddle to set up printing areas, not a way to destructively slice up the page.

UVSAR,
Thank you for your post.
Something new learned, excellent!

Be well...

Hi,
I have written a short applescript that takes care of this problem. I use it as a tool, so I haven't written it to prevent all errors. Try it out on copy of a pdf and see if it will work for you.

http://macproductionartist.wordpress.com/2009/04/01/really-cropping-pages-in-acrobat/


Cheers,

Gregory Ledger
Mac Production Artist

Cool !
Thanks.