How can I automatically crop a page?

Previous topic - Next topic

mike_tyson

I'm working on a complex one-page document in Scribus 1.4.1.

I want to remove all wide borders from the page.

Is there any way to crop a page as close as possible, preferrably automatically? I.e. similar to the "crop"/"remove white borders" command in IrfanView, Acrobat...

P.S.: Just to clarify, my question is about how to crop a PAGE as closely as possible, not about cropping image frames.

Nermander

Pages can't be cropped, you can only change the size of them. And to do that you need to know the wanted size, there is no interactive way.

The reason is that Scribus is print oriented, when creating documents for print, the page size is usually a known and fixed property and does not depend on the content.

mike_tyson

That's funny because the reason why I want to crop the page, is because it is meant for print.

Some printers want all figures in separate PDF files, and those as closely cropped as possible.

I could crop with Inkscape after converting to PDF, but there I run into other issues because Inkscape can't handle the PDF which I generate with Scribus (as I said, very complex figure).

So thanks for mentioning that it is not possible. But I don't think it has anything to do with Scribus being print oriented. Some professional printing services have very clear requirements regarding cropping.

utnik

you should tell us exactly what you try to do (with a sample file or screenshot...)

  • what is the final print product?
  • requirements of the printer
  • sample file with the 'cropping problem'
– then we may be able to help...

utnik

Nermander

I can not understand why a printer would want separate items cropped to their content size. What is the size of the paper the content will be printed on?

PDF is intended as a final page oriented format. The size of the PDF shall match the printed page size.

So normally people who design for print adapt the size of content to fit the page, not the contrary.

I think there must be some misunderstanding about terminology here...

a.l.e

hi mike,

as you have been told: just create the pages at the right size, with 0cm margins, and put the content in there.

you will probably want to learn about bleed to make sure that the printer -- as a machine and as a person printing your job -- can print all you put in the page.
(printers, the machines, are not 100% exact, so you will have to put a bit more content in your pages to make sure that you don't see a small white stripe on any side)

hope that helps
a.l.e

mike_tyson

Quote from: Nermander on September 18, 2012, 10:47:54 AM
So normally people who design for print adapt the size of content to fit the page, not the contrary.

I think there must be some misunderstanding about terminology here...

If you submit a scientific paper to a peer-reviewed, international journal, then typically you submit your text in one file (typically Word), and all figures as separate files, one figure one file, vectorized or in as high resultion as possible, and cropped as closely as possible.

A layout person at the journal then generates the final layout for paper and online publication.

If you don't follow the requirements exactly, the journal will typically incur additional charges, or ask you to re-submit.

Sorry but that's a fact. I don't want to argue about whether PDF is the final format or how PDF was "meant" to be used; fact is, it's as I described above for this type of scientific journals. So cropping makes absolutely sense.

As for defining the page boundaries, this is of course possible but tedious and constraining. There is a reason why many other programs offer an automatic crop option.

There are also very useful programs like pdfcrop on linux. However, pdfcrop does not work in all situations, it chokes on some PDFs and this is the situation I am in now. So I wanted to crop right in Scribus.

a.l.e

mike,

i hope you're aware that scribus is not an ersatz for (typically) word!

nor is scribus a program you should use for one page illustrations.

there are programs that are better suited for this task!

scribus is probably the program your international journal should be using to put together the papers it collected, not the one you should be using to produce the stuff you're sending to the journal.
yes, scribus is for the layout persons!

but -- of course -- you're free to use scribus if you like it!
it still may work and do somehow do what you need, but it is very unlikely that it's the best tool for it.

all in all, cropping the pages to the content boundaries makes almost no sense in scribus, so you will have to find workarounds to get your job done.
and you've been told which workarounds you can use!

of course, one of the workarounds would be to define the page exactly of the size you want to have it. you may even be able to create a script that does this. but this should imo not be a scribus feature (there are imo good reasons for this...)

knowing exactly what you are doing and what the requirements you are talking about would help giving you even better hints...

hth
a.l.e

Nermander

#8
Quote from: mike_tyson on September 18, 2012, 12:47:03 PM
If you submit a scientific paper to a peer-reviewed, international journal, then typically you submit your text in one file (typically Word), and all figures as separate files, one figure one file, vectorized or in as high resultion as possible, and cropped as closely as possible.

Then PDF is the wrong format. And as a.l.e states, Scribus is the wrong tool.

PDF is intended for PAGES. Scribus is intended for page layout.


Use SVG or EPS for vector figures. I think Scribus can export EPS but I'm not sure how how empty space around the content is handled. EPS could probably be imported into Inkscape for cropping.