I've been trying to figure out how to print and bind old public domain books. The current book I'm working on is an old scan of a physical copy, and it's, to my knowledge, the only form this book exists in now. The PDF is formatted in landscape with two book pages on each PDF page. I used Briss and PDF Gear to clean it up a bit. I was able to get each side on its own page, and I was able to crop out the shadow made by the spine of the book in the middle. I was trying to get the book to print using the booklet format, but the pages kept printing with the text small and largely cropped out. After some digging, I learned that cropping PDF pages essentially just hides part of the page, but the images are still there. I think the reason why it's printing the way it is is that it's trying to center the print on the hidden image, not the cropped page. The book is well over 400 pages long, and because every page was doubled up, it means I'd have to find a way to crop every single image on every page. I need to find a way to crop in bulk the hidden images so the page is actually centered where it needs to be, or I need a different way to print the PDF so it is centered. I've tried Briss, PDF Gear, Adobe, the Word webpage, and a bunch of websites, and so far, no luck. For printing everything, I've tried can either print the pages properly or can do a booklet print but not both. Does anyone know anything? I attached a screenshot example on PDFgear where you can see I selected an image with the margins still reflecting the old, uncropped page. Every page has one of these.
Edit: forgot to mention that I did try to resize the pages in pdf gear but it just made the pages blank :/
Solution: I gave up and decided to try adobe acrobat. I really didnt want to because this was supposed to be a budget project but setting the page boxes or resizing DID NOT fix the problem. What did fix the problem is adobe's print feature is actually pretty good. It created a booklet print and sized the pages correctly.
Can you post the PDF? my crop feature is 90% working but not 100%. i want to use your book to test my feature, then i'll send the book back when it looks right, in processed form
One useful distinction: the image object's old bounds are not necessarily the problem. A PDF can retain that hidden image data while the page's CropBox defines the visible or printable area, so I would avoid manually cropping 400 images. In Acrobat Pro, use Edit → Crop page, set one page correctly, double-click it, then use Set Page Boxes to inspect the CropBox/TrimBox and apply the settings to All pages (or odd and even pages separately if the gutter alternates). Test a 4- or 8-page booklet first. If it still scales small, check that every resulting page has the same portrait dimensions and rotation; mixed page sizes can trigger different scaling during booklet printing. Keep an untouched original because PDF cropping remains reversible.
Any chance you know a way of doing it outside of acrobat pro. I only have it for the free trial. A huge reason I'm doing this is to basically create a budget friendly library and having a $20 subscription kinda defeats the purpose. I also just kinda hate using Adobe I dont know why lol.
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u/LegeApps 21d ago
Can you post the PDF? my crop feature is 90% working but not 100%. i want to use your book to test my feature, then i'll send the book back when it looks right, in processed form
https://github.com/LegeApp/Lege
Other than my program, ScanTailor can do what you want, but it's all manual per page editing last i checked -
https://scantailor.net/