Hard trimming PDFs?

[willus]

As you figured out, when headers and footers are truly embedded into a PDF procedural stream, most PDF utility apps will not physically remove them as this would require parsing and interpreting the PDF stream and figuring out which part of it displays graphics outside the bounding/clipping box and removing those instructions. This is very difficult to do cleanly and reliably. The real issue is that calibre does not correctly pay attention to the PDF clipping box when converting the PDF to EPUB, as it should.

[Shohreh]

Indeed, Calibre cropping everything that sits outside the mediabox would have solved the issue easily.

[Shohreh]

To remove header + footer on all the pages:

doc = fitz.open("input.pdf")
#To find mediabox of page 25 in input file: cpdf -page-info input.pdf 25

WIDTH = doc[0].mediabox.width
HEIGHT = doc[0].mediabox.height
rect_header = fitz.Rect(0,0,WIDTH,50) #left,top, right,bottom
rect_footer = fitz.Rect(0,770,WIDTH,790)

numpages = doc.page_count
for index in range(numpages):
	page = doc[index]
	page.add_redact_annot(rect_header)
	page.add_redact_annot(rect_footer)
	page.apply_redactions()
doc.save("redacted.pdf")

#ebook-convert.exe redacted.pdf redacted.epub

[Shohreh]

On Windows, through its Measurement tool enabled/disabled through the "m" key, the free application SumatraPDF lets you see the mouse coordinates as you move it across the PDF.

To find the left,top and right,bottom coordinates of the section you want to remove, simple move the mouse, and type the coordinates into the script.

[MarkFalk]

Try pdfscissors. Here are the related links I have bookmarked:
https://sourceforge.net/p/pdfscissor...read/11d06466/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210213...attredirects=0
https://github.com/abdullah-mazed/pdfscissors
https://www.reddit.com/r/pdf/comment..._pdf_cropping/

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by MarkFalk

Try pdfscissors.

pdfscissors doesn't seem to be in development any more.

[rjwse@aol.com]

You can change and EPUB to PDF via calibre and calibre even allows a 'printer offset' (inner margin, either left or right, is wider than outer margin). However, Amazon will not take calibre's output for margins. PDFJAM is the way to go. It does not have a GUI. You can do almost everything imaginable with it, but you have to start with a PDF. Of course most uploads to Amazon are for ebooks, but to submit for printed books to Amazon it is best to upload PDFs. I have in the past asked about altering calibre's method of doing a printer's offset but, apparently, there is something extremely difficult in restructuring its margin capabilities for Amazon's proprietary requirements. Best regards, Pop

[Quoth]

I can hard trim and delete pages and change resolution using The GIMP. While not the easiest program to learn it is more obvious than ImageMagick.

Probably loses any invisible OCR layers.

[Shohreh]

The modest Python script I posted served me right several times to remove headers and/or footers before converting a PDF to EPUB without bothering with regexes in Calibre/Sigil.

[MarkFalk]

Originally Posted by pdurrant

pdfscissors doesn't seem to be in development any more.

Correct. And it is not easy to find; so I have posted all the links I have bookmarked. But it works. Just test it.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by rjwse@aol.com

You can change and EPUB to PDF via calibre and calibre even allows a 'printer offset' (inner margin, either left or right, is wider than outer margin). However, Amazon will not take calibre's output for margins. PDFJAM is the way to go. It does not have a GUI. You can do almost everything imaginable with it, but you have to start with a PDF. Of course most uploads to Amazon are for ebooks, but to submit for printed books to Amazon it is best to upload PDFs. I have in the past asked about altering calibre's method of doing a printer's offset but, apparently, there is something extremely difficult in restructuring its margin capabilities for Amazon's proprietary requirements. Best regards, Pop

But if you are publishing you have source. Epub isn't source.

If publishing PDF, then simply edit all the content in LO Writer, with appropriate paragraph, character and page styles, headers, footers, page number etc. Then export a perfect PDF direct from LO Writer.

Epub to PDF is only for own use. Madness for publishing. If I ONLY had epub source, for some reason, I'd export docx or RTF and edit as odt in LO Writer.

Any method of cropping PDFs is also only for own uses, say to read on a larger eInk or tablet.

Calibre is fine for managing ebooks, and conversion of real ebooks (re-flowable).


The common reason for me to crop or adjust background on PDFs is because they are PD scans of old PD books or magasines. k2pdfopt, ImageMagick or the GIMP are the best solutions for that.

The workflow would be a bit different if scanning myself to do OCR or doing OCR of PD scan to create a wordprocessor file, then proofed via epub. I'll rarely do that as I'd only do it to re-publish and I can't imagine taking that effort for likely no return.

My 11" tablet is fine for PDFs, and only a 14″ version of it would be better. I don't need to spend hours making them work on a 6″ to 8 ″ eink or a phone screen.

[rjwse@aol.com]

Then export a perfect PDF direct from LO Writer.

I do not agree at all. LOWriter to PDF does not create precision of placement on the page. Stuff like advanced figures, multiple captions, etc all get garbled. You are talking about simple text and the occasional image here and there. I have tried your method and found it to be lacking quality.

[Quoth]

Originally Posted by rjwse@aol.com

I do not agree at all. LOWriter to PDF does not create precision of placement on the page. Stuff like advanced figures, multiple captions, etc all get garbled. You are talking about simple text and the occasional image here and there. I have tried your method and found it to be lacking quality.

Then you are not creating the document properly. Also my context was exporting an ebook from Calibre when you have no other source.

Or Save As a docx and use which ever PDF creation tool of your choice. Calibre is an ebook management and conversion tool, it's much less suitable to make PDFs.

But converting ebooks or word processor files has nothing to do with "Hard trimming PDFs"

[Jamshid]

Use PDF-Xchange Editor's crop feature and check the option remove content outside the cropped area.