Cropping out 3-hole punch images in Acrobat 6.0 Pro

[Loretta C]

I'm having a problem with margins shifting to the left after I crop out 3-hole punch images on either side of the page. I don't quite understand how the crop margins work. I tried changing the left margin to 1" within the Crop Pages dialog box but it shifts the remaining page image off the page to the left. Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

[Fr._Watson@adobeforums.com]

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?




It sounds like you're not doing anything wrong, but that you are expecting the tool to behave differently than it does. The "Crop" tool is removing an inch from the left hand side of your PDF, so the remaining PDF is 1 inch less wide, so the margin has 'shifted' to the left; it sounds more as if you were hoping to "erase" the images of the 3 hole punch, which is not what the crop tool does.

[Ian_Mellors@adobeforums.com]

This is what I do

1. Place a white background, no border, no text, no icon button field over the hole punch images, call all the fields the same name, then duplicate them over all pages.

2. Paper capture the document

3. Delete the 'White' buttons

The punch holes have gone!

It works because the paper capture process takes a new 'snapshot' image of the page as it appears on screen at the start of the process, so anything hidden is ignored.

[Larry_Tilley@adobeforums.com]

Or draw a read only text box over the offending holes and fill with white.

[Loretta C]

Both Larry's & Ian's suggestions worked ... now I have one more question. Is there a way to do this easily on multiple pages? Usually when I'm scanning these pages, I'm working with about 30 pages.

[Larry_Tilley@adobeforums.com]

One offending page at a time.

[Ian_Mellors@adobeforums.com]

"Place a white background, no border, no text, no icon button field over the hole punch images, call all the fields the same name, then duplicate them over all pages."

Duplicating the 'White' button over all pages can be tricky if you have a double sided document. What I do is scan all the odd and even pages seperately, process them, then combine the two pdfs using javascript. If you are using AA5 the following sould do it ..

crete a txt file in your My Documents\Adobe\Acrobat\javascripts folder called merge.js, copy the following into this file and save. Restart Acrobat.

function merge() {

var evenFile = app.response({ cQuestion: "Please enter the \"Even File\" (e.g. C:\\My Documents\\Even.pdf). ", cTitle:
"Even File"});
var oddPages = this.numPages

try {
for (i=0; i<oddPages; i++) { this.insertPages((i*2),evenFile,i); } } catch(e) { app.alert(e); } }

function reversemerge() {

var evenFile = app.response({ cQuestion: "Please enter the \"Even File\" (e.g. C:\\My Documents\\Even.pdf). ", cTitle:
"Even File"});
var oddPages = this.numPages

try {
for (i=0; i<oddPages; i++) { this.insertPages((i*2),evenFile,(oddPages-i-1)); } } catch(e) { app.alert(e); } }

app.addSubMenu({ cName: "Extras", cParent: "Document", nPos: 0});
app.addMenuItem({ cName: "Merge odd and even pages...", cParent: "Extras",
cExec: "merge();"});
app.addMenuItem({ cName: "Reverse merge odd and even pages...", cParent: "Extras",
cExec: "reversemerge();"});

You get a new menu under 'Document' called 'Extras' with two options to merge pdfs.