How To Crop A Multi-Page PDF On OSX

I ran into a little bit of trouble by using remark.js to make this year’s #DesignInTech Report. Because I needed to make it into a PDF for easy distribution and all the docs seemed to indicate it was easy peasy.

Screen Shot 2018-02-25 at 8.02.50 PM

After a healthy amount of time spent installing and trying things out and hitting all the deadends one could hit to figure out Chromium etc, and also being happy to run dash-dash-headless but not really getting anywhere but back to the Print-to-PDF function within the browser, I sipped a cup of tea. The PDF that comes out of the browser’s print function has borders on each page — and I don’t want those borders. Then, I thought maybe there way to crop the resulting multi-page PDF. Yay, OS X! Here’s how you do it:

  1. Open Preview.app
  2. Select multiple pages first.
  3. Use the selection rect.
  4. Go to Tools>Crop.
  5. Voila!

The only downside is you can’t numerically crop the doc, but I’m totally good with this method. —JM

PS Gah. I noted that some of the typefaces don’t load correctly when you try the print-from-browser method. Back to sipping another tea …