Is there a Linux tool that can autocrop the white margins in a PDF file

Question

I have PDF file in which I want to trim all the white space around as much as possible. It has to automatically detect and do it.

I use Foxit reader and it has option to crop pages automatically while viewing.

But I am looking for a command line solution in Linux.

I tried PDFCrop but it crops all the pages uniformly. I want it to crop based on the white space around each individual page using this command:

pdfcrop input.pdf output.pdf

But it works only partially, some pages are cropped but some are not.

Good question. Have you looked at any of these answers on a similar question posted on Ask Ubuntu? — Giacomo1968, Sep 30 '19 at 01:58
see also Are there tools available for trimming PDF margins? — milahu, Dec 30 '22 at 15:18

score 22 · Accepted Answer · edited Jul 26 '22 at 07:58

The best way to remove margins is using pdfCropMargins

Install:

pip install pdfCropMargins --upgrade

Now we can use the command pdf-crop-margins to crop the pdf the way we want

I want to crop all the pages and then add 6bp margin all around. I can do that by

pdf-crop-margins -v -p 0 -a -6 input.pdf
-v : Verbose
-p : how much percentage of margin to be retained. We want the bounding box triming all the white margins on all sides. So say 0%
-a : Note: first -p is applied to create a bounding box. 
     IN this option it applies further on the bounding box after -p is applied. we can remove or add margin. Negative means add margin to the bounding box. So it will add 10bp all around after cliping

The output file is affixed with _cropped

Also I checked the cropped file and all the contents and links are intact.

Is there a Linux tool that can autocrop the white margins in a PDF file

1 Answers1