What Adobe Acrobat and elephants have in common.

June 21, 2006 12:00 PM

Adobe Acrobat 7 Pro. How can I get it to discard parts of the document that I've cropped out?

In Acrobat (I'm using 7 Pro), you can crop a page down to whatever sub-portion of the page you want. But the stuff that's no longer visible isn't actually gone. If someone wants to come along later and un-crop, they can easily do that with the crop tool and wham, there's the rest of your original page visible once more.

I want all that stuff gone. I want the original page size gone. I want what the viewer sees to be all there actually is, with nothing else recoverable. I thought the PDF Optimizer function might do it, or Reduce File Size, but no. Still there.

The only suggestion I've seen is to re-print the PDF as a PDF. I tried it, and it seems to have worked. But what I can't tell is whether the vector goodness of it has been preserved (graphic design novice here, trying to make stuff for people who will require scalable images). And surely there is a way within Acrobat to discard the hidden stuff without going through that each time. Some setting somewhere? Some trick?

posted by kookoobirdz to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I believe that if you run some of the optimizer tools in 7 Pro, you can save file space by actually removing all of the cropped-out materials - try reduce file size, or perhaps redistill.

You can also save as an EPS and redistill, that should work, as the EPS output only exports the crop area. If it doesn't (but it should!), open the PDF in AI, manually crop out, save as PDF.
posted by luriete at 12:21 PM on June 21, 2006

Great question, kookoobirdz! The way the crop tool works has also driven me nuts in the past, because sometimes, even after deleting extra pages from a multi-page document, cropping the page I want, and resaving, I'll go to print the PDF and get a half-dozen or more blank pages printing on some printers, because somewhere in the PDF structure, the links to the pages I removed are preserved. So any solution to this problem would be great.

My question to luriete—does Reduce File Size preserve the full-res vector goodness? If, for instance, one originally printed to PDF via Distiller at the Print Quality setting, will Print Quality be preserved? I ask because the actual print quality of documents that I've reduced file size on usually seems to go down quite noticeably.
posted by limeonaire at 1:58 PM on June 21, 2006

Optimizer can cut down on the file size by stripping out some unneeded stuff, but it doesn't get rid of the stuff outside the crop box. Neither does Reduce file size.

No AI here. All I've got is Photoshop, which is no good because it rasterizes. I guess I'll send out the ones I re-printed to PDF and hope it works for people.

You'd think Adobe could put one simple checkbox on the crop screen which said "discard everything outside crop box". Or maybe it could ask you that after you see the results of your crop, kind of like Windows asks you if you like the display settings you just changed.
posted by kookoobirdz at 6:43 PM on June 21, 2006

Use the Snapshot tool - its button is found right next to the Select Text button, at upper left. Draw the perimeter of the area desired. Then use File | Create PDF | from Clipboard image to create a new PDF of just the clipping.

This will not carry machine-readable text, but otherwise will fill the bill quite nicely.
posted by megatherium at 8:19 PM on June 21, 2006

But Megatherium, that will rasterize it, which is a stated non-goal.
posted by misterbrandt at 9:14 PM on June 21, 2006