PDF Cropping

tags: Pdf Tools

Cropping PDFs can be done through pdfcrop. pdfcrop only takes a single argument, use a bash function to batch crop:

  pdfconstcrop() {
      pdfcrop --bbox "$(
          pdfcrop --verbose "$@" |
          grep '^%%HiResBoundingBox: ' |
          cut -d' ' -f2- |
          datamash -t' ' min 1 min 2 max 3 max 4
      )" "$@"
  }

  pdfcrop_all() {
      for FILE in *.pdf; do
          pdfconstcrop --margins '20 20 20 20' "${FILE}"
      done
  }

This script ensures that the cropped pages are of the same size. Requires datamash.