As sometimes happens, I recently needed to print off a portion of a public-domain work that's been scanned to portable document format and made available for download via Google Books. As the case proves to be at times, the original book had pages with fairly wide margins; when that sort of scanned book gets printed on letter-sized paper, you end up with a smallish text-box in the middle of a page that will have something like two-inch margins. That makes the text harder to read because the font ends up being relatively small, and it also results in waste of a lot of paper.
What to do, then, to make the text larger and make it occupy more of the page? I used three utilities for this job: xpdf to excise the target pages into a postscript file, psnup to enlarge the text and crop margins, and ps2pdf to convert the modified pages back to a pdf file. psnup is part of the psutils package, while ps2pdf relies on Ghostscript. A description of the steps I took follows.
With the pdf-viewer xpdf, the print dialog offer two option: print the document to a physical printer, or print to a postscript file. Both options allow for page-range stipulation. That's how I created a postscript file from the target pages.
Next, psnup--a really handy tool I've used previously for creating booklets (more about that in a future entry), but which I'd never considered might perform a job like this--was used to reduce margins, which had the added effect of increasing the text size. The command I used, which I appropriated from here, looks like this:
psnup -1 -b-200 infile.ps file_zoomed.ps
The crucial switch here seems to be -b (which is short for borders) followed by a negative numeral. Of course the numeral 200 as seen in this example will need to be modified to suit your circumstances.
The final step of converting file_zoomed.ps, using ps2pdf, to a pdf was simplest of all--in fact so simple that I won't even describe it here. I hope this brief description may be an aid to others wishing to execute a task like this.
Finally, I ran across some other related information of interest while reaserching how to crop pdf margins. Here, for example, is a page that describes a few other, more technically-involved ways to reduce margins: http://ma.juii.net/blog/scale-page-content-of-pdf-files. This posting on the Ubuntu forums has a really interesting script someone put together for making pdf booklets: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1148764. And this one offers some clever tips on using another psutils utility--psbook--for making booklets: http://www.peppertop.com/blog/?p=35. Then, there's what might be the most straightforward utility of all for cropping pdf margins--pdfcrop. Since I could not get it to work for me in this instance, I looked for and found the alternative described above.
MUCH LATER EDIT: having done some further experimentation with pdfcrop I've discovered an important element: using negative values to specify width of margins. Doing this, I was able, using this tool, to trim margins to my staisfaction. A command such as pdfcrop --margins '-5 -25 -5 -40' MyDoc.pdf MyDoc-cropped.pdf ended up doing the trick for me quite nicely
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