Adobe Acrobat 7 TIPS and TRICKS THE 100150 BEST [Electronic resources]

TIP 77: Cropping and Rotating Pages

Acrobat lets you import a document in one layout and then customize its appearance. However, if you combine several documents from different sources, you may find discrepancies in the page sizes or orientations. A neat feature in Acrobat is the ability to crop and rotate pages to get them looking just so.

If you are cropping a single page, display it in the Document pane; if you are working with more than one image, select their thumbnails in the Pages pane.

Choose Options > Crop Pages from the Pages pane. If you're working from the Document pane, choose Document > Pages > Crop. If you happen to have the Advanced Editing toolbar open, click the Crop tool to select it. Then click and drag to draw a marquee the size of the area you want to crop on the document page. Double-click within the cropped area. The Crop Pages dialog opens. If you opened the dialog by using the Crop tool, the area you drew on the document page is already shown in the Crop Pages dialog.

The page appears as a thumbnail at the top right of the Crop Pages dialog, and the Crop radio button is selected by default in the Crop Margins area of the dialog. Click the Units pull-down list to change the measurement used in the cropping from the default inches.

Adjust the crop settings using the four margin fields (Figure 77a). As you change the values, the cropping outline in the preview image changes to reflect the new values. You can type values in the fields, or use the arrows to adjust the settings. Check Constrain Proportions to crop the page equally on all four sides.

Note

If you are having a hard time defining a precise margin, drag the Crop Pages dialog out of the way and you can see faint dotted lines overlaying the page where the crop margins are set.

Acrobat 7 also lets you change the page size to display the contents instead of cropping the page (Figure 77b). Click the Page Sizes pull-down arrow and choose from a wide variety of page sizes; or select the Custom option and type a specific size for the page. If you use a specified page size, the crop settings are grayed out.

Finally, specify the page range you wish to crop. If you preselected pages from the Pages pane, they are identified in the fields. You can also specify whether to crop all pages, only even pages, or only odd pages by choosing an option from the Apply to pull-down list.

Click OK to close the dialog, and Acrobat resizes the page. You can see the effects of the cropping in the Document pane, as well as in the Pages pane's thumbnails.

Save the document to preserve the cropping. You can't undo a crop by choosing Edit > Undo or using the shortcut Ctrl+Z or Command+Z. If you change your mind after cropping, choose File > Revert to return to the uncropped version of the document.

Change the orientation of a document so you don't have to turn your neck sideways to read a rotated page. Select the page in the Pages pane. Choose Options > Rotate or Document > Rotate > Pages to open the Rotate Pages dialog. Then choose a direction from the Direction pull-down list (Figure 77c).

Select a Page Range option. If you preselected a page or pages in the Pages pane before opening the dialog, the Selection option is automatically active. You can choose pages within a selection according to orientation and position. Click the pull-down list and choose either odd or even pages; click the lower pull-down list to specify portrait or landscape orientation.

Click OK, the dialog closes, and Acrobat rotates the page.