Monday, September 17, 2012

How to: Crop PDF Images

If you use Matlab (or some other program) to make a plot and then export the figure to a PDF (for inclusion in a TeX document for example), you will end up with plenty of whitespace around the image as below.

It is easy to find out the "bounding box" using ghostscript as:

gs -sDEVICE=bbox -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH file.pdf

which after a bunch of messages yields something like:

%%BoundingBox: 89 231 491 545
%%HiResBoundingBox: 89.766138 231.192063 490.841915 544.769913

You can use those dimensions, and use the TeX command

\includegraphics[bb = 89 231 491 545 ]{file.pdf}

to trim the image within TeX.

Alternatively, you can also use ghostscript to crop the image itself by using:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
   -o trimmedFile.pdf \
   -c "[/CropBox [89 231 491 545] /PAGES pdfmark" \
   -f file.pdf

where the output file trimmedFile.pdf is generated. You then don't have to worry about the bounding box inside the TeX document.

Another route is to use the perl script pdfcrop.

pdfcrop file.pdf

produces the appropriately cropped file file-crop.pdf



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