Acrobat 9 - When the crop tool is not cropping and how to fix it

Acrobat allow us to define a new cropping for a PDF using the Advanced Editing  > Crop Tool, or precisely with the help of the Advanced > Print Production > Crop Pages dialog [Cmd+Shift+T (Mac) /Ctl+Shift+T (Win)]. It works fine, but it does not delete the cropped elements from inside the PDF, there are just hidden. Another problem you might have encounter is that when processed on your RIP, the rendered images is not the one you have cropped but the original at full size. Does that mean the Crop tool is only useful when viewed inside Acrobat? Is there a way to fix that? The answer to that last question is yes! Thanks to the poweful (I admit somehow scaring) Preflight features. Acrobat Preflight setting allow you not only to Analyse a PDF but it also include Fixup command that can modify your PDF and fix it for you.

In the case of our cropped PDF, what need to be done, is to create a new preflight profile that will first, remove all pages objects whose bounding box lies completely outside of the page area as defined by the Crop Box, than to set the Media Box to the Crop box. When created and run, this will fix both issues we have just discussed in the beginning of that post.

You can download this Preflight Fixup here and Import it into your Acrobat Preflight dialog Advanced > Preflight dialog [Cmd+Shift+X (Mac) /Ctl+Shift+X (Win)]. The Setting will appears inside the Imported profile list.

To learn more about Preflight in Acrobat 9, you can watch some videos on Adobe.tv and also read about it on AcrobatUser web site.

Thanks to Leonard Rosenthol, PDF Standards Architect at Adobe Systems for pointing that valuable tips. You can follow him on Twitter at @pdfsage

* Note this Preflight Profile will not load into Acrobat 8.

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