Briss 2.0

Briss is a small application to crop PDF files. It is useful for example to crop whitespaces at the edeges so text is rendered bigger on small screens like eInk displays or tablet PCs.

It helps the user to decide what should be cropped by creating an overlay of similar pages, e.g. all pages within a PDF having the same size or orientation. Even and odd pages are separated too.

Version 2.0 is intended to be a GUI Update for the Briss PDF cropping tool. It is based on Briss 0.9 which is located at sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/briss/ Note that version 2.0 in this repository is developed independently of the original author of 0.9.

Briss is running on Windows, MacOS and Linux and works with Java 8 and above.

Installation

Currently Briss 2.0 is in alpha therefore some features are still missing. If you want to give it a try you can download the pre release from https://github.com/mbaeuerle/Briss-2.0/releases. Starting with v2.0-alpha-5 the whole application including the dependencies is bundled in one Java jar file.

Usage

You can run the application by double-clicking on ./lib/Briss-2.0-all.jar or executing the following command in terminal:

./bin/Briss-2.0

or

./bin/Briss-2.0 cropthis.pdf

Commandline

If you prefer command line and trust the basic automatic detection algorithm use it this way:

./bin/Briss-2.0 -s [SOURCEFILE] [-d [DESTINATIONFILE]]

Example:

./bin/Briss-2.0 -s dogeatdog.pdf -d dogcrop.pdf
./bin/Briss-2.0 -s dogeatdog.pdf

the second line will create the cropped pdf into dogeatdog_cropped.pdf

To split according to columns/rows, respectively use the --split-col and --split-row arguments. For example:

./bin/Briss-2.0 -s dogeatdog.pdf -d dogcrop.pdf --split-col

Splitting columns will try to split the pdf into two columns. Splitting rows will try to split the pdf into two parts by cutting pages in half.

Images

Startscreen with drag and drop support: Cropping view:

Improvements done in Briss 2.0

• Small refinements on gui which improve the workflow
• Better file chooser than provided by swing
• Added support for drag and drop
• Fixed an issue with the image preview showing nothing when all pages look mostly the same

Build instructions

Prerequisites

Make sure you have JDK 11 or later installed.

Build

To build, run the following command:

./gradlew shadowDistZip

You can find the built version in build/distributions

Libraries used

• This software uses two libraries to render and crop PDF files:
  • itext (AGPLv3) http://itextpdf.com/
  • jpedal (LGPL) http://www.jpedal.org/
  • JavaFX (GPLv2) https://openjfx.io