Wednesday, February 6, 2008

Acrobat's Crop Tool

With Acrobat's Crop tool, you can draw a free-form crop region by clicking the page and dragging out a rectangle. Double-click this new region or simply double-click the page and the Crop Pages dialog opens. The Crop Pages dialog enables you to directly enter the widths you want to trim from each margin. You can also specify a range of document pages to crop according to these settings. The Remove White Margins setting sounds like just what we need, but it is inconsistent and it yields pages with irregular dimensions.

Using the Crop tool to draw a free-form region gives you an irregular page size that probably doesn't precisely center your content. The solution is to activate the Snap to Grid feature (View Snap to Grid). By default, this grid is set to three subdivisions per inch. A more useful setting might be four or eight subdivisions per inch.

In Acrobat 5, high-precision cropping requires using points instead of inches, because 1/8-inch increments get rounded to two decimals. In the File Preferences . . . Display dialog, change Page Units to Points. There are 72 points to an inch, or 9 points to 1/8 of an inch.

BBOX Acrobat Cropping Plug-In for Windows
BBOX is a simple tool I use in my PDF production. Download it from http://www.pdfhacks.com/bbox/, unzip, and copy pdfhacks_bbox.api into your Acrobat plug_ins folder. When you restart Acrobat, it will add a menu named Plug-Ins PDF Hacks BBOX.

The BBOX Auto-Crop feature crops as much as it can from the currently visible page. It trims away multiples of 1/8 inch (9 points), so the resulting page size isn't irregular. It tries to be smart, but it sometimes leaves margins that need additional cropping.

The Trim Page features enable you to trim 1/8 inch from the left or right page edges. If you go too far, use the Extend Page features to add 1/8 inch instead.

Sometimes 1/8-inch units are not fine enough to center a page. For these cases, we have the Bump Page features. These do not alter the page width, but appear to move the page one point at a time. They simply reduce the crop on one side and increase the crop on the other, giving you fine control over page centering.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Good topic of Acrobat's crop tool. You explained necessary information in the short and brief. I like the way of explanation that is in simple words but very effective.Thanks.
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