Tutorial: Shrinking and Enhancing Multi-Page PDF Recipes

By Harry {doc} Babad                       ©2008

Introduction

As some of you have by now realized I am both a fan of recipes and of adobe Acrobat Po, now in version 9. Indeed a combination or recipe hunting, mostly from blogs, and an occasional game of Shanghai are my favorite escape mechanisms when sleep evades me.

 

Unless an individual recipe comes from a web site that is recipe collecting cook-orientated perspective, the recipes I download in PDF format are full of chaff. Between Google and banner ads, side bars right and left full of stuff. Some of the material is good stuff. I enjoy reading about the blogger, and occasionally the comment feed back the recipes author has received. The rest of the material just gets in my way, adds to file size bloat, and takes a page full of useful information into 3-5 pages of stuff. Often the authors have either included no picture or have created a multi image lesson, neither of which meets my needs. After all, I’ve been cooking since I was sixteen, and so far have poisoned no one.

 

What I want from the downloaded PDF is a book quality rendering of the recipe. I can then annotate it with notes, adlibs, make ingredient changes I prefer, and as needed add images. For one-item recipes, I’ve found acrobat to be the perfect tool for the task.

 

What about web pages with multiple recipes? — That becomes more difficult since it required both the splitting up of the master PDF (the site page download). I must then accommodate the reality that the pieces (individual recipes) or formatted with even more chaff and combine lots of tag ends from the preceding recipe on that page. In that case, I work directly with the PDF, in my browser (Safari). I either drag-drop or cut and paste the parts of a web page I need into a MSW 2004 document. It some time s takes several repeated copy actions to capture the recipe, any desired adlibs, and the image I want. Obviously, the formatting I carryover from the html-web version is both strange and often unattractive.

 

So before doing much more, I use a recorded macro that serves to (1) change all lines to single spaces, (2) all paragraphs to normal (zero below and after spacing), (3) converts all the text to Lucida Grande 12 black text and (4) saves the result. I then do whatever formatting, in word required to make the recipe attractive, and easily readable. Finally after adding recipe source’s URL and saving the result, I convert the file to a PDF.

 

But I digress — ex-academics do that.

 

In this tutorial I will share the repetitive, but rewarding, process of using Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro to convert a three-page recipe for Three Bean Salad into a one page illustrated format. I do comparable cleanup when I capture technical information to support my technical textbook writing efforts. I know this takes time, but having clean copy feels good when I return to the reference materials.

 

Let’s Do It

The Way Now it is — In order to take a noisy chaff filled three-page recipe and not only shrink it to one page, but add an image to it, I go through a lot of steps. In general the steps and Acrobat tools I use below in narrative, not procedure format.

 

The Goal	Raw Recipe Page One

Raw Page Two	Raw Page Three

First Step

 

Remove Unneeded Frames — This takes multiple passes for each page using the Touchup Object Tool to remove frames. You must be careful to remove material with overlapping doubled frames since that will remove your text. Mistakes can be corrected by using the undo command [⌘-Z].

 

The touchup object tool is powerful and allows you to work with it directly by using your mouse to highlight undesired test or images. You can also be more selective by focusing what you select using either option key or a combination of the option key and the shift key. This is a trial and error process what differs somewhat depending on how the document you are reformatting and editing was prepared.

 

Note the advertising banner in the images changed when I revisited the site to capture images for this article.

 

Step Two

 

Remove Unwanted Banners, Images and Text — As described above, this requires, for each page, extensive use of the Touchup Object Tool and other editing tools provided by Acrobat.

 

Advertising Banner — GONE

Now I’ve Gained Free Space

 

Move Remaining Page 1 Text and Images To the Desired Location — This requires a combination of the Acrobat Clipboard and variants of the Touchup Object Tool using some of the alternative keyboard modifications to control the tools behavior. As noted the tool is available directly from the tool bar. Its focus can be more narrowly and specifically focused when selecting text and images for you’re for tuning your final document consolidation.

 

The steps are simple if at times tedious, especially if you have folder full of documents to reformat and consolidate.

1. First reclaim any unused (cleared) space on page 1 of your document by shifting text/image to the top of the page using the Touchup Object Tool. Yep, you lots of blank space on the lower page portion to move materials from the pages that follow.

2. Having cleared out all the chaff on page 2, copy the desired text you’ve highlighted with the Touchup Object Tool, to the clipboard. Then paste the material into the emptied space on page 1. Note if what the Touchup Object Tool highlights is individual words, this paste will not work. Instead what you paste will be gibberish. Play with the text using various variations of the option or option shift keys until you selected whole lines of text, not lines of highlighted individual words. Repeat, as needed, with information form page three.

Ready for Page 2 Information	Imageless Recipe —Moved and Shrunk Copyright information

Wrong

Correct Grab for Cutting and Pasting

3. Finally, using the delete pages tool [command-Option D or as found in the Document Menu] to rid your self of the extra pages. Save your document or add a picture if need, and you’re done.
   
   Note: If you done the clean-up in a manner that leaves too much white space on either the right or left side of a page, use Acrobat’s trim feature to do just that. Tool [command-Option T or as found in the Document Menu].
   
   
   

Enjoy the recipe… It’s a bit tedious, but I’ve never, well almost never, had the method fail me. Try in on your own to keep findings from the Internet.

 

Now wouldn’t this have been easier if you had a manual?

_doc