: How do I crop a poster on Illustrator? I need to crop this poster to 12.25"w x 18.25"h (to get rid of the crop marks & also white space) in order to meet submission requirements for

@Welton168

The easiest way to do this is to use a clipping path.

1) Make sure the art you want to trim is grouped together.

2) Use the Rectangle Tool to make a rectangle of the required size. The fill/stroke color do not matter.

3) Position the rectangle over where you want to crop the image. If it is perfectly symmetrical you should be able to use the Align tools to center it exactly over the image.

4) Select both the image and the rectangle and hit Ctrl+7 to create a clipping mask.

5) Press Shift+o to edit artboards, then click on the image to resize the artboard to the new image.

This answer is perhaps not the best solution, if the PDF was properly created there are better ways to do it, however this will work even if it wasn't properly created.

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@Gonzalez368

In Illustrator

Since you say you have the poster as a PDF file, I’m going to assume it’s a properly created PDF file (i.e., one that contains vector elements where possible, rather than one where everything is just rasterised as an image).


Open the file in Illustrator.
You will then be able to select the crop marks and delete them as they are just regular line elements in the PDF file.
Select the Artboard tool (Shift + O, at least on a Mac; I presume it’s the same on Windows) and simply adjust the edges of the current artboard to align with the edge of the poster. It should snap to the edge of the artboard elements, so it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Re-save the PDF file, and voilà.


(Of course, you shouldn’t delete the crop marks until after you’ve adjusted the artboard size if you actually need the size to match the crop area, rather than the edges of the poster background.)

 

In Acrobat

You can actually also do this in Acrobat Pro without needing to open up Illustrator at all. Under Tools → Print production, choose Set Page Boxes, select the CropBox in the drop-down menu, and set the margins to match the crop area. Alternatively, if the PDF was originally created in something like InDesign, which handles bleed and crop marks very well, you can check if the TrimBox is already set (and matches the desired area), and then set the CropBox margins to the same values as the TrimBox margins.

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