Comments on: The PDF page boxes: MediaBox, CropBox, BleedBox, TrimBox & ArtBox

By: steve

steve — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 06:52:18 +0000

if you are on using linux you can install the xpdf program which installs a utility called pdfinfo… you can run pdfinfo -box filename.pdf from console and it prints out the box info for the pdf.

By: Tom Benjey

Tom Benjey — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:03:58 +0000

I am getting the same mesages and don’t have a clue what they mean. Have you found out what the problem is yet?

By: Mirsad

Mirsad — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:40:34 +0000

For displaying the crop, media, trim, bleed boxes use… page geometry tool… its free and simple!

If you can not find it.. let me know! i can send it 2u

By: Laurens

Laurens — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:39:53 +0000

I don’t know of any way of displaying the boxes in Acrobat 6 (which I admittedly used that long ago that I forgot everything about it).
There might be some fairly cheap tools that can do this. One solution that I gave a brief try is the Enfocus Browser, a free plug-in that is compatible with Acrobat 6 and later. It can be found here: http://www.enfocus.com/product.php?id=4530. After you install this, open a document and click the ‘Browse Current Page’ icon. The window that pops up lists the boxes and displays their 0,0 coordinates and height and width. It is not as visual as showing the boxes onscreen, but hey: it is free and comes from a trusted source.

By: Quentin

Quentin — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 08:48:13 +0000

Hi,
Having a file produced by scanning, with a lot of blank and black borders, I would like to get DEFINITELY rid of them in order to decrease the file size.
Crop, trim, and other boxed only afect display, not the actual images. How can I really crop the images ?

Please also reply on qdemaret@msn.com
Thanks for your help

Again, great article.
Quentin

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 17:55:46 +0000

Great article and website.
Anybody know if it is possible to display the boxes in Reader or Acrobat Standard?
Acrobat Standard 6 that is. My company probably won’t upgrade to a newer version anytime soon ;P

By: Katie

Katie — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 19:00:26 +0000

I was able to manipulate the image by using Crop and Trim both on just the odd pages. The Even page still shows .623 crop but it does not show up when I view the pages.

By: Katie

Katie — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 18:40:01 +0000

Is it possible to use the crop controls to adjust registration for back to front printing? Our printer is slightly off, so I’m trying to use the crop Odd pages to shift the image slightly on the paper to compensate. What puzzles me is that if I set the crop/trim to .0623 and then set to zero, when I open the Crop Pages again, it has reverted back to .0623.

By: Laurens

Laurens — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 11:06:35 +0000

Some prepress workflow systems can point out inconsistencies in the page boxes of all the PDF files of a job.
I am not aware of any tools that can do this in the PDF creation phase. It also seems difficult to do since an application cannot know that for instance those 4 InDesign PDF exports created by 2 different designers are actually part of the same publication. Nothing stops a publisher from preflighting all their outgoing PDF files agains a fixed page size.
Maybe other visitors to this page can point to possible solutions.

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:12:35 +0000

Netz, Laurens: MediaBox is indeed required. However contrary to this article, I have found a PDF with a cropbox larger than the mediabox:

/CropBox[0 0 595 842]
/MediaBox[82.5 90 512.5 750]
/TrimBox[82.5 90 512.5 750]

I guess this means it has no effect.

My question is: Which box does Adobe reader use to decide how much of the page to display. My guess would have been TrimBox, which defaults to the value of CropBox, which defaults to the value of MediaBox, but this doesn’t seem to be the case.