Wisdom of the PDF Sage

One of the Acrobat engineers just shared with me a very useful feature that he put into Acrobat 9 to help out folks doing print production
with Acrobat. I thought I’d share it here.

Acrobat has had a Crop Tool since (at least) version 5, but that tool only let you set the CropBox of the page.  While useful for non-printing features, most printers didn’t like it because it only dealt with cropping while they deal with Bleed and Trim.   They could have used Acrobat’s Crop Pages dialog, but that requires you to type in values, and not work interactively and directly on the page.

Well not anymore!

Acrobat 9’s Crop Tool lets you set the newly drawn out area as the ArtBox, TrimBox, BleedBox or (of course) CropBox.  Just right-click (or control-click on a single button mouse) and at the top of the contextual menu are your choice of page boxes.

And with Acrobat 9 automatically showing the Art, Bleed and Trim boxes on the page, the result of your action is immediately visible.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 at 6:24 pm and is filed under Acrobat 9. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.