Briss is a cross-platform open-source Java application that does one thing and does it well: cropping PDFs. Usually, that’s exactly what you need to format cumbersome documents for a tablet or e-reader’s small screen.
It turns out that to format PDFs for e-reading, cropping is the richest tool you usually need, so long as your cropping tool is as easy, fast and powerful as Briss. It can convert two-page spreads into single vertical pages, slice off extra-wide margins and get rid of ugly metadata like page numbers and chapter headings.
Trimming this information is essential if you’re converting your PDF to an e-book format like EPUB or MOBI; because e-book conversion doesn’t keep the same pagination, you’ll wind up with numbers and text in random spots, usually in the middle of a page. Now that even dedicated e-readers like the Kindle, Nook and Sony Reader support PDF out-of-the-box, it’s optional.
The UI is dead simple, if a touch unforgiving. When loading a PDF file, Briss analyzes it to check for repetitive structures — for instance, that all of the pages are the same size and have roughly the same margins. It usually offers different options for even and odd pages. If the PDF is a two-page spread (i.e., two pages of a book or magazine copied onto a single page in the PDF), it detects that as well.
Then outline the parts of the document you want to keep into different crop areas. If you’re splitting spreads into one-page vertical columns, you might have as many as four. If you have a uniform PDF that just needs its margins trimmed, there might only be one. Briss then applies that crop to every page in the document, outputting a file into the same folder with “_trimmed” appended to it. The original file remains intact.
This is usually as easy as cropping an image in any application, but in some cases with spreads I’ve had to perform crops blind. I usually select half the page to be column one and the other half to be column two, then fine-tune it later. Adobe Photoshop’s can perform the same task with a more sophisticated and reliable interface, but it’s nowhere near as lightweight (or free) as Briss.
The romance-novel/e-book blog Dear Author has more detailed instructions on how to use Calibre to further convert PDFs to e-book-native formats, but in my experience, the new generation of e-readers handles PDFs just fine. In most cases, your PDFs may have been simple photocopy-and-scan jobs without OCR text; converting to a text format without also performing an OCR scan won’t help them anyways.
I also leave the page numbers on books I crop, so I can reference them as easily as I could a print edition. For scholar and student users, e-books’ lack of stable page references makes working from them a huge headache; paginated PDFs don’t have that problem.
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