How do I rescale cropped material with pdfcrop

Question

I'm running pdfcrop (version 1.31) on Mac OSX. From what I read on pdfcrop page I should be able to rescale the size of the final document. The suggested approach is

pdfcrop infile.pdf letter outfile.pdf

to rescale the final version to fit to letter. When I try this I get the errror

PDFCROP 1.31, 2010/09/17 - Copyright (c) 2002-2010 by Heiko Oberdiek.
!!! Error: Too many files!

Many people are posting nicely cropped snippets of their final results. My cropped material pales.

Answer 1

The PDFCrop is different from the pdfcrop you are using. The latter does not rescale, it is just a Perl script that uses ghostscript bbox device to get the bounding box and uses it to crop the PDF file. There are options for specifying margins or bounding boxes, but rescaling is not part of them.

This can be achieved by a driver file for package pdfpages, e.g.:

\documentclass[letter]{article}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\includepdf[pages=-]{the-cropped-file}
\end{document}

Additional margins can be achieved by either using option --margins for pdfcrop or trim for \includepdf (documented in grfguide for \includegraphics).