Crop PDF documents comfortably with Briss

The pdf format is highly popular and there are so many third-party tools and programs available that manipulate pdf documents in one way or the other that it is difficult to keep an overview of them all.

If you need to crop documents, you may want to take a look at the open source program Briss for Windows.

Note: Briss requires the Java Runtime Environment on the system or it won't work.

It allows you to extract contents from existing pdf documents easily by selecting them in the program interface.

After you have loaded a pdf file into the program interface using the File > Load File menu, it is automatically cropped by the program itself. You do have options to load only select pages of the document or all of the pdf.

All major content areas of the document are selected by default and if you only wanted to remove whitespace from documents, you are done and can save the document using Action > Crop PDF.

You can draw new rectangles on any page visible in the interface to include content in the output. It is furthermore possible to remove rectangles that the program added automatically again if you don't require them and want to customize the selection.

Rectangles are drawn using the left-mouse button. Just hold it down and move the mouse around to increase or decrease the dimensions of the rectangle. When you let go of the mouse button it remains on the screen.

To remove a selection rectangle again simply right-click on it and select the delete rectangle option from the context menu.

Other options include resizing rectangles or changing their position on a page. A couple of helpers are available as well, for instance to maximize the height or width of rectangles.

You may want to preview the resulting pdf document first before you create it which you can also do under the action menu.

Closing Words

Briss offers excellent usability and several interesting options that the majority of tools don't offer. You can use the program to separate different regions of the same page to separate pages, for instance if multiple columns are displayed in it which you don't like or want.

The selection process is as easy as it gets and errors can be corrected easily using simply mouse operations.