What Adobe Acrobat and elephants have in common.
June 21, 2006 12:00 PM Subscribe
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?
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?
Response by poster: 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
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
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
posted by misterbrandt at 9:14 PM on June 21, 2006
This thread is closed to new comments.
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