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We've scanned part of a book (which we have rights to do) into a series of PDFs. But of course the results need to be cropped and maybe straightened. So we are looking for free software that lets you crop and merge PDFs, but ideally some sort of bulk crop that would let us do lots of pages at once.
Any ideas?
Do they all need exactly the same crop applied? If so I believe Preview will do this, if you combine all the pages into one PDF first. If you’re talking about some kind of smart crop that e.g. identifies and removes and unwanted border, then I dunno.
I think Preview only rotates in 90 deg increments. I expect you could use a Photoshop action to bulk crop and rotate (again only if they all need to be done the same)
Preview on Mac?
This is for my Mrs on W10 although I could maybe do it on here. We have photoshop, does that work with PDFs?
https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-server/ you can merge with this
For cropping standard response is ghost script. Example https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6183479/cropping-a-pdf-using-ghostscript-9-01
Use these two tools and write a script
Yeah Preview on Mac. I have just tried it, it will take you all of 10 seconds! Just make sure all the page thumbnails are selected in the window on the left so it applies the crop to all the pages.
Find someone with a copy of photoshop.
Just leave your scans as jpegs(scanned pdfs will work just as well), If they all can all be cropped the same way, run them through photoshop action(open image, click record action, crop first photo, save, close, stop recording action. file>automate>batch>run saved action on all your scans), if not, manually crop them in photoshop(constrain your proportions/dpi), that shouldn't take that long, even if it runs to hundreds of pages, you could easily do xx pages per minute. Save them all, make sure they are all named as the correct page numbers and saved into a folder.
File>Automate>pdf presentation>
add the folder, should put things in the right order but if not you can re-order the files attached.
export your final pdf at the desired qualties..