Guide to reducing borders around text in a pdf

OK, here’s a howto on using LaTeX with the pdfpages package to strip whitespace from around the text of an existing pdf document. Say you have a pdf with a large blank marginspace around the text. The following LaTeX file will make a new version. Unfortunately, it will lose any bookmarks, links etc. I usually run it with pages={-8} to process just a few pages, tweaking the offset and scale values until it’s stripping out the bits I want, then change back to pages={-} or maybe a different page range to strip out any guff you don’t want. It’ll also let you glue together multiple pdfs into one file.

\documentclass[a5paper,oneside]{book}
\usepackage{pdfpages}
\begin{document}
\pagestyle{empty}
\includepdf[pages={-},offset=0mm -5mm,scale=1.3,pagecommand={}]{”pdf_file_name”}
\end{document}