[Tex/LaTex] A tool like pdfcrop2 that only reduces margins from original — as opposed to cropping and then allowing the addition of extra margins

marginspdfcrop

I have a tool called pdfcrop2 that I've had for a while now. It's a perl script that fully crops PDF files to the actual content (removing all surrounding whitespace), and then allowing the addition of extra margins if one wants them.

However, does there exist a tool similar to this one that does not perform the initial crop, but rather limits itself to reducing the margins by a specified amount from the left, right, top and bottom?

This will be useful in cases where all of my one-page PDF files are all A4-sized but are not exactly of the same format. (Examples would be the initial pages of chapters vs. all other pages in a document with a book format. In these cases, it would be nice to get the same “predictable” effect on all pages.)

Best Answer

The pdfcrop2 tool turned out to have an absolute option, which did what I needed.

However, I'm on a Mac, and I needed to install pdfinfo using MacPorts.

I should probably also record what version I'm using of pdfcrop2 (shown with the --help argument).

PDFCROP 1.5, 2004/06/24 - Copyright (c) 2002, 2004 by Heiko Oberdiek.
Patch 0.4, 2007/02/18 - Copyright (c) 2007 by Piotr Adacha.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to adapt classicthesis layout to B5paper and Linux Libertine

The manual of geometry v5.6 reads:

"The options specified for the area, in which the page dimensions are calculated, are added: layout, layoutsize, layoutwidth, layoutheight and so forth. These options would help to print the specified layout to a different sized paper. For example, with a4paper and layout=a5paper, the geometry package uses 'A5' layout to calculate margins with the paper size still 'A4'."

For your thesis layout=b5paper, of course. Using layouthoffset=((A4 paper width minus B5 paper width)/2) "specifies the horizontal offset from the left edge of the paper", "layoutvoffset specifies the vertical offset from the top edge of the paper": layoutvoffset=((A4 paper height - B5 paper height)/2).

\usepackage[a4paper,layout=b5paper,layouthoffset=17mm,layoutvoffset=23.5mm,%
  showcrop]{geometry}% B5 at A4

respectively

\usepackage[b5paper,layout=b5paper]{geometry}% B5 at B5

should work. And use either geometry or \areaset but not both, because they both try to set the page layout and mixing them can cause unwanted results.

[Tex/LaTex] How to make pdfcrop output all pages of the same size

I found that the --verbose flag will output the bounding box used at each step. Since this was a "growing" animation, the last page is the largest.

So to get them all the same size, I ran pdfcrop with --verbose and extracted this output:

%%HiResBoundingBox: 48.000022 299.872046 624.124950 420.127932

and then fed that to a second run of pdfcrop, specifying the bounding box:

pdfcrop --bbox "48.000022 299.872046 624.124950 420.127932" ~/animation.pdf

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Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to adapt classicthesis layout to B5paper and Linux Libertine

[Tex/LaTex] How to make pdfcrop output all pages of the same size

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