There will be times when you have a document that you need to scan for your class or for your personal use. Once you have done this, you realize that there is a lot of unnecessary empty space on the document and you decide to crop it. Now, when you go to print it, you see wasted portions of a piece of paper.
The process of cropping a page in Acrobat Pro is a simple one. When you crop a page in Acrobat, it is similar to taking a pair of scissors and cutting off portions of the document. The effect is that you are left with a reduced size document. Instead of your document being a printable 8.5" X 11", it is now an awkward 6.48" X 7.15." Not only do you have an odd border to your printed page, but you are also wasting space. By resizing your pdf file in photoshop you will be resizing your document to a printable 8.5" X 11", and increasing the size of the document's contents.
First, open the document you intend to resize in Adobe Photoshop. You can do this by right clicking on the icon of your document, selecting Open With and selecting Adobe Photoshop.*
Once Photoshop has opened your file, you will be met with a smaller window that was thumbnails of each page within your document (in this example-15). At the top of this window select Pages to view your document as pages.
Now you must highlight every thumbnail. To do this you can press the Command (if you are working on a Mac platform) or the Control (if you are working on a Windows platform) on your keyboard and click on each thumbnail until all of them are selected.
After doing this, you will have to deselect the option that says Constrain Proportions and then type in the desired image size (in this example 8.5" X 11" [the average page size]) that you would like. You can locate this by referring yourself to the red and blue arrows in the image below, respectively. Select Ok at the bottom right hand corner of that window.
Photoshop will now be opening each individual page of your PDF document in a separate Photoshop window. At this point you have successfully resized your document pages to your desired size. However, you now need to reformat them into a single PDF file. To do this simply click File, Automate, & PDF Presentation.
A new window will open. Select the option to Add Open Files & Multi-Page Document. At this point make sure that the numbers at the end of the names are in order. If they are not, simply drag and drop the first page to the top of the list, and continue until they are in numeric order. Click Save. You can view this process in the following image by looking at the Red arrow and the Blue Arrow, respectively.
A new window will open asking you to name and indicate where you want this file to be saved. Choose your location and click save. After this a new window will open. If you would like to view the final resized document select the option to View PDF After Saving. You do not need to do anything else now but click Save PDF.
Congratulations! You have now resized your PDF document into an appropriate dimension for printing. Remember you can save anything to a PDF format, and therefore resize almost anything to a printable size. For further information on saving your document in PDF format, please refer to my previous blog entry - PDF Files or Dobromir's - Save anything in PDF!
If you have any questions about this, or any other STA Blog Post, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment.
*note: If you do not have Adobe Photoshop installed on your computer, you can use this program in the Faculty Instructional Technology Center (FITC) in the library.
