Crop Pages in Adobe Acrobat
Sometimes you will receive a PDF file with a large page size that needs to be cropped. Acrobat can do this with ease:
- First open the PDF file and go to Document > Crop Pages
- Under Margin Controls, check the box for Constrain Proportions if you’d like to keep the width and height ratio the same.
- Next, click on the up arrows to the right of Top, Bottom, Left, or Right.
- In the preview area, you’ll be able to see what your cropped page will look like.
- Below the preview area, Acrobat also tells us what the new page size will be after cropping.
- When you’ve set your Margin Controls (how much you’ll be cropping) click OK and save your PDF file.
- One of the nice things about the crop tool is that you can undo your changes even after saving a PDF. This is because Acrobat doesn’t truly crop the document, it simply covers up what you don’t want displayed.
Nice, and not so nice. The ‘not truly cropping’ aspect can be a pain when calling said cropped pdf file into a page layout picture box. For example, InDesign doesn’t seem to acknowledge the fake crop, and will default to the Full Document import, ignoring the crop. You can manually tell it to import the image to its crops, but in a mostly automated workflow, this stoppage just slows things down.
Tony: I am having the same issue with importing PDFs with printers/crop marks. I know I can simply make the image box the size that I want and then place the image. but…the printers marks and whatnot make it so that the image is not centered and thus trying to align the image to the center of the image box is next to impossible.
Anyway, you mentioned that > How is this done? I have not been able to figure it out.
Hi. How I can really crop pages, reducing file size?
As far as I know, you can’t truly crop a PDF with Acrobat. To shrink the file size try this:
http://acrobatsupport.com/shrink-the-file-size-of-a-pdf-in-acrobat-8
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You can also use the PDF Optimizer. This option is located under Advanced > PDF Optimizer.
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Mitch
I’d like to know — similar to K Zarecki — is that since Acrobat is smart enough to know and understand crop marks on a document (exported from, say, an unnamed “other” page layout program), and show them as a “crop box” in the crop dialog box — why can’t I USE that “crop box” to crop the PDF? Isn’t that a fairly obvious thing? Maybe it should be in Preferences, in the initial view tab: “Crop to Crop Box”. Much easier than trying to redraw the crop and getting it wrong.
Completely agree with SC Abbot, it’s gotta be the thing that most pisses me off with acrobat, 4 lovely options that you can’t use except to copy the numbers so you can paste it in again?? wacky.
great, it works….