Cropping scanned pages

[Prepper]

I have a project where I'm taking thousands of scanned pages, combining the tiffs in Acrobat into books, saving a PDF, placing that into Indesign so we can position and straighten them.
I've found a way in Acrobat to deskew them and if I could only crop them all uniformly to the content on the page I think I could nearly automate this process and be done with it in much less time.

All the pages are simply black text on a white background, they have a header with the title and a page number, I was thinking if I could deskew them first and then crop somehow to the header, leaving 1/16" or 1/32" margin.
The problem I have is that margin varies across all the documents and from page to page sometimes, so I'd need to crop from the page content somehow?

Anyone know of a way to do this in Acrobat, or some other software?

Thanks

 

[Stephen Marsh]

Photoshop would probably be a better bet to TRIM to content (upper left pixel value), as it is a dedicated pixel editor. This could be batched via a very simple action.


Stephen Marsh

 

[Prepper]

There's a way in Photoshop to crop a certain distance from the type instead of from the edge? The margins on these tiffs vary from page to page from the edge of the image to the type.

 

[leonardr]

I have a project where I'm taking thousands of scanned pages, combining the tiffs in Acrobat into books, saving a PDF, placing that into Indesign so we can position and straighten them.
I've found a way in Acrobat to deskew them and if I could only crop them all uniformly to the content on the page I think I could nearly automate this process and be done with it in much less time.

This would be a GREAT use for the new Enhance Scans features of Acrobat DC.

 

[Stephen Marsh]

There's a way in Photoshop to crop a certain distance from the type instead of from the edge? The margins on these tiffs vary from page to page from the edge of the image to the type.

Presuming that the upper left pixel value is pure white (255rgb) and that the rest of the page is pure white with no specks/dots, it will TRIM until it hits a pixel that is not white, which ideally would be the black pixels of the page content. Once all of the white space is removed, one can then add consistent white margins back into the artwork.

When it comes to scans, it will be a real case of GIGO, so YMMV.


Stephen Marsh

 

[mattbeals]

Callas pdftoolbox server can do this.

 

[Prepper]

This would be a GREAT use for the new Enhance Scans features of Acrobat DC.

Yes, that's what I did. I had downloaded the new DC version and was checking it out and found that. I went in settings and turned off almost everything except deskew and that did good job on what I've seen so far. Only did a few files though, found a page or two that needed a little more straightening. But with them straightened, I placed in Indesign with PlaceMultiPagePDF script, on a page with just 1/8" margins, exported a PDF, placed that result into Indesign on my desired page size, ran AdjustLayout script to position it where I wanted it, exported that for my final file.

I think this can be refined but it sure isn't me manually deskewing and positioning every page anymore!

Thanks

 

[Prepper]

Presuming that the upper left pixel value is pure white (255rgb) and that the rest of the page is pure white with no specks/dots, it will TRIM until it hits a pixel that is not white, which ideally would be the black pixels of the page content. Once all of the white space is removed, one can then add consistent white margins back into the artwork.

When it comes to scans, it will be a real case of GIGO, so YMMV.


Stephen Marsh

That is what I was hoping but some of these pages do have stray elements, like the ones I was doing yesterday, most of them have a black line running vertically down the image between the edge of the page and the type, from the scanner, so not sure what I'd do with those.