pdfcrop

Version: 2023/04/15 v1.42

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Description
2. Copyright, Disclaimer, License
3. Files
4. Requirements
5. Installation
6. User Interface
7. Restricted Mode
8. Author
9. Acknowledgement
10. Questions, Suggested Improvements
11. Known Problems
12. History
13. ToDo

1. DESCRIPTION

PDFCROP takes a PDF file as input, calculates the BoundingBox for each page by the help of ghostscript and generates a output PDF file with removed margins.

2. COPYRIGHT, DISCLAIMER, LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2002, 2004, 2005, 2008-2012 Heiko Oberdiek. 2020-2023 Oberdiek Package Support Group

LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3c or later.

3. FILES

The project pdfcrop consists of two files:

pdfcrop.pl: This perl script is the main program. The extension .pl may be omitted.
README.md: Documentation, the file you are reading.

Following temporary files are produced if pdfcrop is invoked:

tmp-pdfcrop-*.tex: input file for pdfTeX, luatex or xetex
tmp-pdfcrop-*.log: log file of pdfTeX, luatex or xetex run
tmp-pdfcrop-*.pdf: result after pdfTeX, luatex or xetex run

The temporary files are deleted after the run unless the --debug option is used.

4. REQUIREMENTS

• Perl5 (version 5 of the perl interpreter)
• Ghostscript (>= 8.0 if PDF file contains rotated pages)
• pdfTeX, version >= 1.0 (because of page selecting and pdfximage syntax) or XeTeX or LuaTeX.

5. INSTALLATION

Normally pdfcrop will be installed by the TeX system.

If a manual installation is needed

1. Perl script pdfcrop.pl:

TDS 1.1 location (TDS means "texmf" tree, see CTAN:tds/tds.pdf):

• TDS:scripts/pdfcrop/pdfcrop.pl
• and a directory that is part of PATH contains a wrapper script or link with name "pdfcrop".

Unix

• It is allowed to rename pdfcrop.pl to pdfcrop: mv pdfcrop.pl pdfcrop
• Ensure that the execute permission is set: chmod +x pdfcrop
• Move the file to a directory where the shell can find it (environment variable PATH, e.g. /usr/local/bin/).

Dos/Windows

• See requirements. I do not expect that the perl script runs under DOS.

2. Restricted program version rpdfcrop

Generate links or install pdfcrop.pl again under the name rpdfcrop.

Prefer rpdfcrop if you want to add pdfcrop to the programs that may be executed in TeX's restricted shell escape mode. (This feature is added in TeX Live 2009.) For TeX Live (since 2009) see entry for shell_escape_commands in the configuration file texmf.cnf.

3. Documentation README.md:

Copy it to an appropriate place, for example /usr/local/share/doc/pdfcrop/README.md. It is allowed to rename it to pdfcrop.txt or pdfcrop.md.

TDS location:
somewhere below texmf/doc/... (?)

Examples:
TDS:doc/support/pdfcrop/README.md
TDS:doc/scripts/pdfcrop/README.md
TDS:doc/scripts/pdfcrop.txt

TeXLive 2020 put it in TDS:doc/support/pdfcrop/README.md

6. USER INTERFACE

• ToDo: User manual
• Online help: pdfcrop --help
• Ghostscript's calculation of the bounding box is faster, if --resolution 72 is used instead of ghostscript's implicite default setting of 4000 DPI (hint from Ionut Georgescu). Of course the calculation with higher resolution settings are more accurate.

7. RESTRICTED MODE

Restricted mode is enabled if:

• option --restricted is used,
• the program is called under the name rpdfcrop
• or the called program name contains restricted.

This mode sets restrictions for the following options:

• --pdftexcmd: if used, the value must be empty or pdftex.
• --xetexcmd: if used, the value must be empty or xetex.
• --luatexcmd: if used, the value must be empty or luatex.
• --gscmd: if used, the value must
  • be empty or
  • be one of the standard names (gs, gswin32c, gswin64c, mgs, gs386, gsos2) or
  • consists of gs, followed by a version number and an optional c (Ghostscript's convention for console version).

8. AUTHORS

Heiko Oberdiek
Email: heiko.oberdiek at googlemail.com
Oberdiek Package Support Group
https://github.com/ho-tex/pdfcrop

9. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Anthony Williams
Scott Pakin <pakin at uiuc.edu>
Ionut Georgescu
Yves Jäger
R (Chandra) Chandrasekhar
Christian Stapfer
David Menestrina
Karl Berry

10. QUESTIONS, SUGGESTED IMPROVEMENTS

If you have questions, problems with pdfcrop, error reports, if you have improvements or want to have additional features, please send them to the author or add an issue to https://github.com/ho-tex/pdfcrop

My environment for developing and testing:

• linux, SuSE 9.0
• perl v5.8.1
• pdfTeX 3.141592-1.40.x
• Ghostscript 8.x

11. KNOWN PROBLEMS

• pdfcrop relies on Ghostscript for the calculation of the Bounding Box. If Ghostscript returns wrong values or cannot process the pdf file, it sometimes helps to try another version of Ghostscript.
• Older XeTeX (and pdfTeX < 1.10a) does not allow the setting of the PDF version in a direct way. In this cases pdfcrop tries to fix the PDF version afterwards in the PDF header and XeTeX warnings as the following can be safely ignored.

  ** WARNING ** Version of PDF file (1.6) is newer
            than version limit specification.

12. HISTORY

13. TODO

• Description of user interface.
• Documentation in other formats, eg. man or info pages.
• Improved error checking.
• Units support for option --margins.