5 Replies Latest reply: Aug 16, 2014 6:43 AM by sinjinz1984 RSS

    Discarding cropped areas of pages

    joshweiland Community Member

      I am taking PDFs of documents made for printing and reformatting them & compressing them to be downloadable PDFs on our website.

       

      This requires cropping some pages manually using the crop tool.  I then use the PDF Optimizer to compress the file into a web suitable file size.

       

      I just realized that cropping a page DOES NOT discard the content outside of the crop. Even after using PDF Optimizer or Reduce File Size, the content outside of the crop still remains. Anyone with Acrobat can remove the crop or change the crop.

       

      I'm trying to create PDFs with the smallest file size possible, so it's silly to keep the content outside of the crop. Is there a way to discard this content?

        • 1. Re: Discarding cropped areas of pages
          Bill@VT CommunityMVP

          It used to be that Reduce File Size would delete the cropping. I think that feature was dropped. The only way I have found is to refry the PDF by printing to a new PDF, generally not a recommended workflow. You can also delete areas with the redaction tool. That may allow you to then adjust the size and all. The info would be gone in that case, though the basic space is still there. By using redaction and then crop, that might meet your file size needs. The other approach that I have mentioned is to reprint to the Adobe PDF printer and create a new PDF.

          • 2. Re: Discarding cropped areas of pages
            the_10th_letter_x2 Community Member

            Acrobat allows you to save a PDF as an EPS {Save As Other... More Options... Encapsulated PostScript}. Opening the EPS file generates a PDF sans cropped area. The PDF can then be optimized or reduced or saved as is.

            • 3. Re: Discarding cropped areas of pages
              Test Screen Name CommunityMVP

              This is just another way of "refrying" and not even as good as the normal way of printing to PDF. So, in my view, not recommended.

              • 4. Re: Discarding cropped areas of pages
                joshweiland Community Member

                What I've been doing in Acrobat 11 is crop the page, then zoom out.  Using the "Edit Text & Images" option, I then click-and-drag over the page that got cropped.  This selects the elements in the cropped page.  After cropping, I hit "Delete".

                • 5. Re: Discarding cropped areas of pages
                  sinjinz1984 Community Member

                  There is a way in Acrobat 11 to remove the cropped content permanently. Just select "Tools", then "Protection", and then select "Hidden Comment". Acrobat then searched for cropped content, hidden metadata and such, and then asks you what you want to delete. Once you've made your selection about which parts of the document you want to permanently remove, click "Remove". This then permanently removes anything outside of the cropped area. Adobe will probably ask you if you're really sure about making the changes, because once the content has been removed, it cannot be returned. Then, just make sure to save the changes that you've made.

                   

                  Hope that this helps...