Cropping PDFs on iPad?

Tech Support
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1

Does anyone know how to crop a PDF on iPad?

PDFExpert doesn’t have that ability and I’ve tried to export the pdf to Photos and then do it there, but that doesn’t seem to work.

I just need to crop all the dark matter off this scanned photo copy here

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2

Does it need to remain a PDF? You could screenshot it, then crop the screenshot in photos?

3

Have you tried saving just the image out of PDF Expert(not the whole pdf)?

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There are iOS utilities that do pdf->jpg and jpg->pdf, but the quick-and-dirty method I’d use for a single image would be screenshot then adjust/crop by editing in Photos.

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EDIT: It seems the crop in GoodReader is only a view setting within the app. Exporting does not retain the crop :frowning:

Goodreader can crop PDFs. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/goodreader-pdf-editor-viewer/id777310222

Crazy how many stunts this Swiss army knife app can pull off.

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6

You could also crop the image in PDF Expert and resize it or use the Crop Mode view.

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That was also my initial plan. But wouldn’t that reduce the file size or quality?

Which utilities would be able to export/import to jpg and pdf?

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How would I do that exactly?

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Well, I’m just adding to the list now of what the iPad probably just can’t do.

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Yeah that was also my initial thought. But doesn’t that bring down the quality of the eventual pdf if it’s a screenshot of a photo copy etc…

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With the pdf open in PDF Expert, do you see a tab called Edit PDF? I can’t remember if the editing functions were included in the app or if they are something that I payed extra for. If so, click on that and then select the image of the page. Some action options should pop up.

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Quite possibly: assuming it’s starting off at a higher resolution than the iPads screen of course. You could zoom in / attempt to position as screen filling as possible before taking the screen shot to preserve as much detail as possible.

The other factor to consider would be, does the resulting “reduced quality” jpeg still have sufficient detail for what you need to use it for? You could still retain the original PDF should you did need to go back and redo in future.

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Edit PDF is there and so is “Image”. However tapping on that just opens the iPadOS Image (Photos) ticker

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You’re completely right. It is of course the best way to go, but still just so crazy that this is not possible on the iPad Pro!

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I know exactly how to do this.

  1. If you want to crop/correct poorly scanned docs, try Prizmo 5. It can import PDFs and adjust them.
  2. Other tools for cropping include “PDFGenius” and “Badger PDF Negotiator”, which are both quite powerful toolkits for PDF tasks.
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I hadn’t used this app in a long time because I use ScanBot for scanning, but it allows you to import PDFs, crop, and export as PDF. Worked perfectly.

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How is the OCR with Prizmo?

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Genius Scan allows me to do it free. But Prizmo looks very interesting if their OCR works well then I might consider using that instead of PDF Expert

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The OCR is great. It can even embed OCR’ed text into scanned PDFs. I used it with hundreds of pages of old textbooks and was really impressed it managed to do it.

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Hmm interesting. So you scanned a whole textbook with the iPad app and the ocr allowed you to search the books reliably?