General ⇒ What's the best way to trim margins from a PDF?

[daverove]

I've been looking for the best way to view some PDFs on a tablet (the Calculus PDFs from here: http://tutorial.math.lamar.edu/download.aspx ). The PDFs have wide white margins and I find that in order to make the text comfortable to read, I have to zoom each page manually on the PDF viewer on the tablet.

I'd like to remove those margins, so the pdfcrop utility (part of Texlive) would seem to be perfect if not for one huge flaw. pdfcrop disables the contents links so the output document can no longer be navigated from the contents page, which makes navigating a 300 page PDF a non-starter. (pdfcrop tested on Debian Jessie.)

Does anybody know of some command line tweak that would stop pdfcrop from disabling the contents links? Or can anybody recommend other ways to remove margins from a PDF? Or does anybody know of a PDF viewer app for an Android tablet that can automatically crop margins as the page is viewed? Any help would be appreciated.

[daverove]

OK, never mind, I've found something that works.

With more Google searching, I found a cross-platform Java-based too called "Briss" that crops margins from PDFs. It was quite glitchy, turned other apps on the screen to funny colours, and when it saved the output file it then launched the Gimp graphics editor for no good reason. But the main thing is that it generates good output files, which were just what I wanted.

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi,

welcome to the forum!

I use pdfcrop a lot. I did not notice yet the issue with the hyperlinks, since I used it either for print or for cropping images for embedding them with LaTeX.

Thanks for telling us about Briss!

Stefan