Clean up a scanned book PDF — crop borders, drop blank pages, cut the size
2026-10-06
A scanned book arrives with black borders on every page, blank pages in the middle and a size in the hundreds of megabytes. On a tablet the text is small and page turns are slow. Three steps make it readable.
Use the tool
1. Remove blank and duplicate pages
Open the file in Organize PDF to see every page as a thumbnail. Delete blanks and duplicates and rotate flipped pages right there. For several hundred pages, thumbnails take a while; splitting the file first speeds things up.
2. Crop the borders
In Crop PDF set the four sides in millimetres. Scan borders usually disappear at 5 to 10 mm. The remaining content becomes relatively larger, which is what makes it readable on a tablet.
If left and right pages have different margins (the binding side is wider), split odd and even pages, crop each set, and merge again.
3. Compress
For a text-only book, medium reads fine and cuts the size dramatically. Keep light for books with illustrations. If you need searchable text, check first whether the file already has an OCR layer; a raw scan is not searchable at any setting.
Copyright
Keep this to books you own, for your own reading. Distributing the cleaned file is a different matter.