Taking a page (or two) off a PDF

As many know, JSTOR and a number of other databases put an initial page on their PDF’s before the actual article. I find this page annoying. Is there a way to take this page off of the PDF in DT? Is there a script that can do it?

I know I can choose to print, choose the pages and generate the PDF, and then reimport the new PDF, but that is a bit of a process.

thanks

Danny,

If you have Acrobat, it’s a pretty quick process. If not, you could use the free PDFlab to do the job. If you don’t mind a bit of Terminal action, there is PDFtk. I personally find that first JSTOR page helpful, especially for bibliography, and it seems to maybe have even helped with a few “see also” searches within DT before, but that’s a subjective guess.

Can your suggested apps do this process within DT? That’s what I’m looking for.

I can understand it being helpful for “see also”, but if you are running DT Office, then it is not necessary.

You can always right-click from within DT to open the PDF in any program you want. That’s how I use Acrobat as an extension to DT, :slight_smile: .

The others wouldn’t be exactly as simple of one step, but it’s doable.

I do use Office, and don’t see what difference it makes to that first JSTOR page, especially for the “see also” features.

Lastly, on a kind of related note: there is a little shareware program called PDFShrink that has been doing a good job reducing my DTPO produced PDFs by about 30-40%. I couldn’t get Acrobat to do that for some reason. Again, I just right-click on the PDF from within DT, select to OPen with PDFShrink, which just opens up, reduced, and closes automatically. Works well.

PDFShrink is very cool, thanks.

It would be nice if DT had this type of feature built in to their “backup & optimize” or “rebuild database” tools.

I use the program pdfpen - smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/ -to cut, add, share, and rearrange pages in pdf’s. It does much more and it, too, is available within DTP.

I know how to do it in Acrobat or PDFpen or PDFlab… but I really would like to be able to do this within DTP. That darned right-click menu takes about twenty seconds to open on my machine.

(Yes, I need more RAM. I am on a year-old MacBook Pro with 2 gigs of RAM, and it won’t accept any more.)

Here’s my scenario. I normally leave my ScanSnap set for duplex scanning. (Aside: why doesn’t Fujitsu label that option “one-sided” or “two-sided”?) If I’m scanning magazine articles and I don’t want to waste time OCRing the back halves, and I don’t want the hassle of removing those pages manually in a different program, I set it for simplex scanning.

And then I forget to set it back.

Then I scan a wagonload of bank statements and other two-sided documents and throw away the originals without realizing I only got half the pages. Oops.

This happened to me earlier today. Luckily, the originals were still in the trashcan, since it’s Sunday.

As I just posted in another thread… sometimes it’s not the tools, it’s ourselves.

BUT…

If I could have an option to (1) defer OCR until later, and (2) delete pages within DTP, I would never move the ScanSnap from duplex mode, and I’d never lose data!