Trimming a PDF file

I often come across PDF files with massive margins. And even though the actual content is reasonably small, I am not able to print 2 pages per sheet, because the margins take most of the page and the text becomes tiny.

Is there a way to trim the margins, i.e. get a new PDF file with smaller page size, such that each page is just a pre-defined area of the original pages (e.g. start at 1 cm from the top and from the left, and take 15 cm width and 20 cm height).

I am mainly after a solution working under Linux, but Windows-based answers are also welcome!

Grzenio

Posted 2011-12-12T13:27:37.610

Reputation: 2 599

Sounds like you want to change the Print Area... You can access extra print options within 'Print', 'Page Setup' is at the bottom - but certainly in mine the Margin's are greyed out... With these editable you could 'trim' it down then scale it up to fit the page size? – HaydnWVN – 2011-12-12T13:40:50.303

You could also use a PDF printer to re-print the PDF (assuming you use the appropriate media scaling and clipping options) in the proper format. – Breakthrough – 2011-12-12T14:14:22.637

Answers

Briss makes it easy to crop PDF files. It displays a view with all the pages of the PDF overlaid on top of one another and you fit a rectangle over the portion you wish to preserve. I have frequently used it to split multi-page PDFs into a reasonable format for use on an e-reader.

duomo

Posted 2011-12-12T13:27:37.610

Reputation: 334

1I like the feature that it would automagically select the optimal size of the trimmed pdf. – Grzenio – 2011-12-16T14:07:21.157

PDF-Shuffler is a small python-gtk application, which helps the user to merge or split pdf documents and rotate, crop and rearrange their pages using an interactive and intuitive graphical interface.

Eroen

Posted 2011-12-12T13:27:37.610

Reputation: 5 615

The only tool that I find really satisfactory at this job (as well as many other tricky PDF manipulations) is k2pdfopt.

To trim (or rather "crop" in k2pdfopt's lingo) a PDF file, f.i. starting 1cm from the upper-left corner and expanding to a width of 10cm and a height of 20cm, just call it like this:

$ k2pdfopt -ui- -x -mode crop -cbox '1cm,1cm,10cm,20cm' \
input_file.pdf

The resulting PDF will have a page size of exactly 10x20cm.

sphakka

Posted 2011-12-12T13:27:37.610

Reputation: 147

May not always work due to formats but always worth a try for batch processing is IrfanView

You will need Ghostscript plugin to read PDF but AFAIK you can then load batch settings for 1 auto crop white space margins 2 increase canvas a fixed amount (for a little white space between the two half pages) 3 if needs be rotate all the pages 4 use panorama tool to stitch pairs of pages 5 send pairs to the built-in pdf-out plug-in

alternatively acrobat full can do similar by setting the crop value on all pages then show in facing mode then if you wish use distiller to print single sheets of pairs

kod

Posted 2011-12-12T13:27:37.610

Reputation: 136