{"id":656430,"date":"2013-05-07T02:13:53","date_gmt":"2013-05-07T06:13:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/betanews.com\/?p=147912"},"modified":"2013-05-07T02:13:53","modified_gmt":"2013-05-07T06:13:53","slug":"got-a-badly-formatted-pdf-try-briss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/656430","title":{"rendered":"Got a badly-formatted PDF? Try Briss"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"It\u2019s not difficult to create PDFs these days. If your application doesn\u2019t already have a \u201cSave as PDF option\u201d, then a virtual printer like Bullzip<\/a>\u00a0will generally get the job done.<\/p>\n

These converted documents won\u2019t always be formatted properly, though, and large or oddly-sized margins can be a real problem — but that\u2019s where the open-source\u00a0Briss<\/a>\u00a0comes in. If you need to crop PDFs, perhaps to remove page numbers, maybe just to make the document easier to read on a small screen, then this small free program could an excellent solution.<\/p>\n

Briss is a compact Java-based tool, and so there\u2019s no installation required — just unzip it, browse to and launch briss-0.9.exe. Click File > Load File, choose the PDF you\u2019d like to crop (pressing Cancel at the \u201cInput\u201d screen, this time) and you\u2019re ready to begin.<\/p>\n

The program will open your PDF and analyze it, before displaying the results in an appropriate structure. We tried this with a PDF book, for example, and it organised all the left pages into one group, all the right pages into another. Every page in each group was then overlaid on top of the other, so we could see the extent of our document. And a blue rectangle was displayed over each group.<\/p>\n

To define the cropping area, all we then had to do was move and resize the two blue rectangles accordingly. Everything below the rectangle would be preserved, while everything else disappears — it\u2019s very quick and easy. If you\u2019re unsure at any point then clicking Action > Preview will show you what your current cropping arrangement has done, while clicking Action > Crop PDF will save it for real. (Don\u2019t worry, the original document is preserved, this only saves a copy.)<\/p>\n

Useful though this is, it\u2019s only part of what Briss can do. If you\u2019ve scanned a book, say, you might find your PDF now has two book pages squeezed into one document page, which looks ugly and messes up your PDF page numbering. But use Briss and you can define regions within a document page, and split them back into separate pages, restoring the original structure and probably making the file much easier to read.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s even simple command line support, allowing you to set up scripts which can process a folder of PDFs entirely automatically.<\/p>\n

All of this is presented in a rather basic interface, which takes a little time to master. If you occasionally need this kind of PDF cropping or reorganising ability, though, it\u2019s worth investing your time \u2013 once you\u2019ve learned the basics,\u00a0Briss<\/a>\u00a0becomes one of the quickest ways to crop a PDF that we\u2019ve seen anywhere.<\/p>\n

Photo Credit:<\/strong>\u00a0Hitdelight<\/a>\/Shutterstock<\/a><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s not difficult to create PDFs these days. If your application doesn\u2019t already have a \u201cSave as PDF option\u201d, then a virtual printer like Bullzip\u00a0will generally get the job done. These converted documents won\u2019t always be formatted properly, though, and large or oddly-sized margins can be a real problem — but that\u2019s where the open-source\u00a0Briss\u00a0comes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7429,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-656430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656430","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7429"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=656430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/656430\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=656430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=656430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=656430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}