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.
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.
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, .
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.
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!