How to crop permanently in Acrobat?

After cropping anything by using the crop tool in Adobe Acrobat, how do I ensure that the cropped area is fixed and can't be seen even when I increase the crop margin?

For example: how would I crop the following example (image and text) to ensure the image and the part "I don't want to include this text" are really removed, and not hidden somewhere in the result?

Adobe Reader's crop tool only seems to hide the cropped part; it does not really remove it:

Solution 1:

You can use PdfCpu:

pdfcpu crop '0 0 .5 0' in.pdf out.pdf

https://pdfcpu.io/core/crop.html

Or if you must use Acrobat:

You can do this with a Preflight fixup. It is annoying to set up, but pretty easy to use after that.

1. Tools Print Production Preflight Select single fixups Options Create New Preflight Fixup
2. Name Permanent crop
3. Fixup category Pages
4. Type of fixup Set page geometry boxes
5. Source MediaBox
6. Destination Relative to TrimBox (meaning "use the dimensions of the TrimBox").
7. OK
8. Fix

Solution 2:

In Acrobat DC,

Type "redact" in the Search Tools... field at the top of the right sidebar, then choose "Remove Hidden Information."

In Acrobat X,

• Tools

  • Protection

    • Hidden Information

      • Remove Hidden Information

It works with me...

If the purpose is just to hide the information that was cropped, this works. But if you want to actually make the page smaller, this doesn't do that. The full document is still the original size, with the cropped portions turned white.

Using Adobe Acrobat 9,

1. Create a temporary folder, place the pdf to be cropped there
2. Crop the file using Adobe Acrobat
3. Open the Adobe cropped pdf file
4. Select File -> Export -> Image -> PNG
5. Click "Save"
6. Go into the temporary folder, select all the PNG files, right click select "Combine supported files in Acrobat"
7. Click "Combine files"
8. Save the newly combined file. This file has is permanently cropped and is of the same quality as the original

Solution 3:

The simplest way is to print as PDF (again) the cropped document. Since the crop tool of Acrobat just hides the area from printing, the resulting new PDF document will not show the hidden areas anymore.

In the latest version of Acrobat (at least with v10) printing to pdf from pdf is "not supported". However, the earlier suggestion to remove hidden information and objects using the "protection" area of the tool box was helpful. Specifically, it removed the items I was trying to crop out. However, I have yet to find a way to change page size in a permanent way using the latest version of Acrobat Pro.