Intro.

I use Sony DPT-RP1 (a.k.a. Digital Paper) as a paper reader. In spite of the 13.3-inch-big screen of this device, large margins of pdf files made my eyes tired. I wanted to crop pdf files with the following requirements.

1. Meta data like a title and authors should be maintained after being cropped.
2. The size of cropped file should be reasonable (similar to the original file).
3. Some components in the pdf file need to be cropped out. (For example, page numbers at the bottom.)

I used pdfcrop tool before. It was easy to use and the output was acceptable but the size of file increases unexpectedly (e.g. 600KB to 5MB).

Solution

pdf-crop-margins python tool was great for me. You can get the detailed information from the official site.

Install

It is assumed that pip is installed in your PC.

sudo pip install pdfCropMargins

Usage

I used pdfCropMargins as below.

pdf-crop-margins -ap4 45 49 45 49 -p 100 AAA.pdf -o AAA_cropped.pdf

pdf-crop-margins crops out margins of a pdf file with the default configuration. The result with this default configuration also nice but the third requirement was not satisfied in my case.

With -ap4 (pre-crop) option, I could crop out the page number and adjust to fit my device’s screen perfectly.
With -p 100 option, it does not crop further after the pre-cropping.