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• • February 11, 2014 at 2:24 am #67106
    BoydE

    Participant

    Hi Guys,

    I’m sorry if this is a little long-winded, but please bear with me.

    I have a customer that has asked me to make amendments to some PDF files that they hold.

    Due to the level of editing involved, it isn’t practical to do this in Acrobat, so I am importing the PDF into InDesign, cropping the PDF where necessary and inserting any new content that is required.

    The issue that I am experiencing is that when I export the file from InDesign as a new PDF, the cropped data remains within the file.

    I have selected “Crop image data to frame”, which I thought would fix it, but didn’t. I have also tried white-boxing over the unwanted content, again it doesn’t work, and although not visible, the unwanted content still remains within the newly created PDF.

    My customer has stated that they need to be able to select the content from the new PDF, but are able to select both the old and new content, which isn’t acceptable.

    Basically I need to be able to supply a new PDF file which only has the current content, and not the deleted/hidden content.

    I have tried outputting from CS and CC, also I have tried going via postscript and then to PDF, but the results are the same. I am working on a Mac running Mavericks.

    Any ideas would be very much appreciated.

  • February 11, 2014 at 6:47 am #67109
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    It is a very frustrating situation. Claudia wrote about it here:
    https://www.claudiamccue.com/2012/09/holy-crop-how-to-really-crop-a-pdf/

    The only good solution seems to be to print the PDF and redistill as PDF, which is not officially supported. Or, to do this from InDesign, print as device-independent PostScript and run it through Acrobat Distiller. Sigh.

  • February 11, 2014 at 7:39 am #67111
    BoydE

    Participant

    Hi David,

    Thanks for the suggestions, unfortunately neither of them worked, looks like my customer is going to have to live with the issue until Adobe give us an option to remove any hidden content.

    Ah well, one can dream.

    Regards,

    Boyd

  • February 11, 2014 at 7:41 am #67112
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Did you try printing to postscript and using Distiller? That pretty much has to work, unless I’m misunderstanding the problem. I can write up those steps if you don’t know how to do it. (Few people need to do this anymore.)

  • February 11, 2014 at 8:13 am #67113
    BoydE

    Participant

    Hi David,

    I did try printing to postscript using the following methods after creating a generic postscript printer:

    From InDesign – Via the print menu, selecting postscript file, device-independent;

    From Acrobat – Via the print menu, (a little more tricky) selecting printer at the bottom of the print dialogue and after moving through a few menus, finally printing to postscript file.

    Then I ran both files through Distiller.

    Both of these methods create perfect pdf files, but have left the hidden unwanted content in the new pdf. If you drag the Section tool through the text, it picks up the hidden text as well as the current text, which, of course, isn’t good.

    If the steps I’m using are wrong, I’d appreciate it if you would write up the steps you feel would work.

  • February 11, 2014 at 9:21 am #67115
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Wow, that’s weird. You place a PDF in InDesign and crop it down. Then you print postscript to disk and run it through the distiller. And the stuff that is cropped out is still there. Am I getting that right? Can you share that PDF with me to mess with? (Put it somewhere like in dropbox that I can access?) I’m out most of the day, but I’m curious as to what it going wrong.

  • February 11, 2014 at 11:47 am #67117
    BoydE

    Participant

    Hi David,

    Sorry, I didn’t check the output file closely enough, you’re right, the hidden content has been removed, however, it still leaves some issues within the file which is why I thought the hidden content was still there.

    What’s happening is when you select the text of the new pdf in Acrobat, it doesn’t select in the correct order, for example if you select the text in the supplied file and copy and paste it to another application (InDesign or Word for example), you will see the the textual order has changed. Note that I have numbered the paragraphs to more easily show the issue.

    The file is at the following: https://www.dropbox.com/s/ut21kuco9lfcefr/Test%20file%2002.pdf

  • February 11, 2014 at 5:08 pm #67126
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    Oh, yeah… once you go the Distill route, there’s virtually no way to get the text “flow” right. It’s just a bunch of characters on a page. You can’t have it all. ;)

    Ultimately, a better solution would be to use PDF2ID (recosoft.com) to convert the files to native InDesign files, then clean it up, and get rid of the stuff you don’t want.

  • February 12, 2014 at 2:52 am #67147
    BoydE

    Participant

    Thanks David,

    Did try PDF2ID a few years ago, but the resulting clean up wasn’t worth the effort. Problem I have is my customer won’t reset the files from scratch, which is what’s really needed.

    Thanks again for your help, at least the resulting file is cleaner than before now I’m using your method.

    Regards,

    Boyd

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