PDFCropService

PDFCropService is a workflow for the macOS Finder Services menu. It crops vector or bitmap images saved as PDF files from the print dialog, for example. It is useful when you want to insert high-quality graphics into a, say, LaTeX, Word or Pages document and your graphics app only offers saving graphics as full pages from the print dialog. PDFCropService automatically trims all white margins, so that any picture can easily be imported into a text document.

Setup

1. Download ZIP file from this GitHub page.

2. Install Homebrew. You can do that with /usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

3. Install ps2eps which does all the work (convert single page PDFs to EPS and calculate the bounding box): brew install ps2eps

4. Double click the Automator service Crop PDF Graphic. You can decide whether to open it in Automator or to install it. If you choose to install it, it will be placed inside the Services folder in your user's Library folder.

or

4. If you have MacTeX installed, double click the Automator service Crop PDF with pdfcrop. You can decide whether to open it in Automator or to install it. If you choose to install it, it will be placed inside the Services folder in your user's Library folder. This script version uses pdfcrop from the MacTeX installation.

After installation the service is available in the Services context menu when you click on a PDF.

Usage

Using Finder, right-click on a PDF (or several PDFs) to open the context menu, navigate to Services and select Crop PDF Graphic or Crop PDF with pdfcrop. The original PDF will remain untouched, the cropped file will be marked with _cropped. You can try it with the included test.pdf:

test.pdf -> test_cropped.pdf

Info

Inside the Automator document Crop PDF Graphic there is a bash script:

for f in "$@"
do
	# Edit given file path
	name=$( basename "$f" .pdf) # name of file without path and without extension
	dir=$( dirname "$f" ) # name of directory of file
	cd "$dir" # Make it the working directory

	# Add brew directories to PATH variable, since ps2eps is a Pearl script which uses Ghostscript
	# Just providing the complete path to ps2eps is not sufficient
	PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/opt/homebrew/bin

	# Convert to Postscript format, taking care of whitespace characters
	eval pdf2ps "'$f'"

	# Trim all whitespace for ps2eps
	name_nowhitespace="$(echo -e "${name}" | tr -d '[:space:]')"
	mv "$name".ps "$name_nowhitespace".ps

	# Calculate and set bounding box, --loose expands the original tight bounding box by one point in each direction
	ps2eps --loose "$name_nowhitespace".ps

	# Convert back to PDF using Ghostscript, important option is "-dEPSCrop"
	gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dDOINTERPOLATE -dUseFlateCompression=true -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -r1200 -dEPSCrop -sOutputFile="$name"_cropped.pdf -f "$name_nowhitespace".eps

	# Remove temporary files
	rm "$name_nowhitespace".ps
	rm "$name_nowhitespace".eps
done

Troubleshooting

If you have MacTeX installed, both script versions will probably fail with an error from ghostscript ("Can't find initialization file gs_init.ps"). If this happens, you can issue brew link --overwrite ghostscript to force the usage of homebrew's version of ghostscript.

pdfcrop from the MacTeX package also only works if you do that.