Destructive crop in Preview app

[furby]

I've scanned a fair amount of documents to PDF and now I want to crop them. So I open up Preview, select the area. Crop. Save. Quicklook at the file in Finder and it looks cropped. Open it again in Preview and it's the original uncropped version.

Am I doing something wrong? Or can you not crop destructively in Preview?

[Elliott]

I get this when I try and crop a PDF in Preview:

Have you tried going to View > PDF Display? It has two options: Crop Box and Media Box. You have to make sure that Crop Box is selected. As for permanent destruction, I don't think there's any way to make preview destroy in a PDF crop.

The only thing you really could do is save the PDF as another format (say, TIFF). It should hold the crop then.

Edit: You could also do a selection of the area of the PDF that you want to keep, copy it, and do File > New from Clipboard. Then you can resave it as a PDF that's permanently cropped.

[furby]

Distracted by other work today. Grr. Anyway, Ye I have it set to Crop Box, doesn't make a difference though. Doing the copy, New from Clipboard does the same thing. Guess I could save them as images and then do it, but I'd like them as PDFs as I am joining pages together, which is just just drag and drop in Preview.

What's the point of fake cropping them? Think I'll end up doing the crop in Photoshop and the join in Preview. Bit of a hassle when it initially seemed so easy.

[furby]

This is maddening! Why can't you destructively crop a PDF? It's a really laborious process in Photoshop so I downloaded the trial version of Adobe Pro 9.0 and even that doesn't work. Ahhh!