How to crop permanently in Acrobat?

Question

After cropping anything by using the crop tool in Adobe Acrobat, how do I ensure that the cropped area is fixed and can't be seen even when I increase the crop margin?

For example: how would I crop the following example (image and text) to ensure the image and the part "I don't want to include this text" are really removed, and not hidden somewhere in the result?

Adobe Reader's crop tool only seems to hide the cropped part; it does not really remove it:

Answer 1

You can use PdfCpu:

pdfcpu crop '0 0 .5 0' in.pdf out.pdf

https://pdfcpu.io/core/crop.html

Or if you must use Acrobat:

You can do this with a Preflight fixup. It is annoying to set up, but pretty easy to use after that.

1. Tools Print Production Preflight Select single fixups Options Create New Preflight Fixup
2. Name Permanent crop
3. Fixup category Pages
4. Type of fixup Set page geometry boxes
5. Source MediaBox
6. Destination Relative to TrimBox (meaning "use the dimensions of the TrimBox").
7. OK
8. Fix

Answer 2

In Acrobat DC,

Type "redact" in the Search Tools... field at the top of the right sidebar, then choose "Remove Hidden Information."

In Acrobat X,

• Tools

  • Protection

    • Hidden Information

      • Remove Hidden Information

It works with me...

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If the purpose is just to hide the information that was cropped, this works. But if you want to actually make the page smaller, this doesn't do that. The full document is still the original size, with the cropped portions turned white.

Using Adobe Acrobat 9,

1. Create a temporary folder, place the pdf to be cropped there
2. Crop the file using Adobe Acrobat
3. Open the Adobe cropped pdf file
4. Select File -> Export -> Image -> PNG
5. Click "Save"
6. Go into the temporary folder, select all the PNG files, right click select "Combine supported files in Acrobat"
7. Click "Combine files"
8. Save the newly combined file. This file has is permanently cropped and is of the same quality as the original

Answer 3

The simplest way is to print as PDF (again) the cropped document. Since the crop tool of Acrobat just hides the area from printing, the resulting new PDF document will not show the hidden areas anymore.

In the latest version of Acrobat (at least with v10) printing to pdf from pdf is "not supported". However, the earlier suggestion to remove hidden information and objects using the "protection" area of the tool box was helpful. Specifically, it removed the items I was trying to crop out. However, I have yet to find a way to change page size in a permanent way using the latest version of Acrobat Pro.

Answer 4

Go to Document → Examine Document.

There you can press "remove" to delete the hidden information.

Answer 5

Adobe pdf's retain pieces of information often when you don't want it too... there was even a case recently where the military where blacking out text but in a second layer, which once removed made a lot of classified information readable.

Its hard to tell what adobe keeps and doesn't, if there is information you don't want in the pdf I think your best bet is not to put it there in the first place... if it is a picture, copy it out of adobe, crop it, and paste it back into a brand new pdf.

I'm not entirely sure that any of the listed tools will actually crop it properly like you want.

Answer 6

I found this AppleScript on another site Mac Production Artist Tips and Scripts :

tell application "Adobe Acrobat Pro"
  tell active doc
    repeat with i from 1 to count of pages
      tell page i
        set cbox to crop box
        set media box to cbox
      end tell
    end repeat
  end tell
end tell

Hope that helps. It's crazy that there's no easily accessible method to ACTUALLY crop pages in Acrobat.

I needed to modify it because I needed to crop to the trim box thus:

tell application "Adobe Acrobat Pro"
  tell active doc
    repeat with i from 1 to count of pages
      tell page i
        set tbox to trim box
        set media box to tbox
      end tell
    end repeat
  end tell
end tell

Answer 7

I built a tool that handles basic redaction free PDF Redaction tool. When you upload the document, it gives you the ability to draw redaction marks and on the way out flattens it completely removing any embedded information and sanitizes metadata. You could use this to crop the page, just be ware that this will rasterize any vector graphics you have on the page.

Answer 8

My preferred method is to print to actual paper with the highest resolution possible, then scan it back in redacted and without OCR in a fresh PDF.

Answer 9

I have had some success cropping and then printing to Adobe PDF in my printer selection. This is an option that I believe comes with a full version of Acrobat. There are many other programs and downloads that can provide such a "printer".