diff --git a/prog/cleanpdf.c b/prog/cleanpdf.c
index 9976771af..727d37e00 100644
--- a/prog/cleanpdf.c
+++ b/prog/cleanpdf.c
@@ -87,6 +87,10 @@
  *
  *    Whenever possible, the images will be deskewed.
  *
+ *    As the first step in processing, images are saved in the ./image
+ *    directory as RGB at 300 ppi in ppm format.  Each image is about 26MB.
+ *    Delete those images after use.
+ *
  *    Some pdf files have oversize media boxes.  PDF is a
  *    resolution-independent format for storing data that can be imaged.
  *    Usually the data is stored in fonts, which are a description of the
diff --git a/prog/croppdf.c b/prog/croppdf.c
index ec12a12ee..24e866ea2 100644
--- a/prog/croppdf.c
+++ b/prog/croppdf.c
@@ -28,55 +28,28 @@
  * croppdf.c
  *
  *    This program concatenates all pdfs in a directory by rendering them
- *    as images, optionally scaling the images, and generating an output pdf.
- *    The pdfs are taken in lexical order.  Pages are encoded with either
- *    tiffg4 or jpeg (DCT), or a mixture of them depending on input parameters
- *    and page color content.  For DCT encoding, the jpeg quality factor
- *    can be used to trade off the size of the resulting pdf against
- *    the image quality.
+ *    as images, cropping each image to the foreground region with
+ *    options for noise removal and margins, slightly thickens long
+ *    horizontal lines (e.g., of a music staff), and to some extent
+ *    scales the width to fill a printed page.  See documentation for
+ *    pixCropImage() for the parameters.
  *
- *    If the pages are monochrome (black and white), use of the %onebit
- *    flag will achieve better compression with less distortion.
- *    If most of the pages are black and white, but some have color that
- *    needs to be saved, input parameters %onebit and %savecolor should
- *    be both set to 1.  Then the pages with color are compressed with DCT
- *    and the monochrome pages are compressed with tiffg4.
+ *    The pdfs are concatenated in lexical order, and each image
+ *    is encoded with tiffg4.
  *
- *    The first step is to render the images as RGB, using Poppler's pdftoppm.
- *    Compare compresspdf with cleanpdf, which carries out several cleanup
- *    operations, such as deskewing and adaptive thresholding to clean
- *    noisy or dark backgrounds in grayscale or color images, resulting
- *    in high resolution, 1 bpp tiffg4 encoded images in the pdf.
- *
- *      Syntax:
- *       compresspdf basedir scalefactor onebit savecolor quality title fileout
+ *    Syntax:
+ *       croppdf basedir threshold lrclear tbclear edgeclean 
+ *               lradd tbadd title fileout
  *
  *    The %basedir is a directory where the input pdf files are located.
  *    The program will operate on every file in this directory with
  *    the ".pdf" extension.
  *
- *    The %scalefactor is typically used to downscale the image to
- *    reduce the size of the generated pdf.  It should not affect the
- *    pdf display otherwise.  For normal text on images scanned at 300 ppi,
- *    a 2x reduction (%scalefactor = 0.5) may be satisfactory.
- *    We compute an output resolution for that pdf that will cause it
- *    to print 11 inches high, based on the height in pixels of the
- *    first image in the set.
- *
- *    Images are saved in the ./image directory as RGB in ppm format.
- *    If the %onebit flag is 0, these will be encoded in the output pdf
- *    using DCT.  To force the images to be 1 bpp, with tiffg4 encoding, set
- *    the $onebit flag to 1.
- *
- *    The %savecolor flag is ignored unless %onebit is 1.  In that case,
- *    if %savecolor is 1, the image is tested for color content, and if
- *    even a relatively small amount is found, the image will be encoded
- *    with DCT instead of tiffg4.
+ *    The %lrclear and %tbclear parameters give the number of background
+ *    pixels to be added to the foreground region.
  *
- *    The %quality is the jpeg output quality factor for images stored
- *    in the pdf.  Use 0 for the default value (50), which is satisfactory
- *    for many purposes.  Use 75 for standard jpeq quality; 85-95 are very
- *    high quality.  Allowed values are between 25 and 95.
+ *    The %edgeclean parameter is used to remove edge noise, going from
+ *    0 (default, no removal) to 15 (maximally aggressive removal).
  *
  *    The %title is the title given to the pdf.  Use %title == "none"
  *    to omit the title.
@@ -84,14 +57,9 @@
  *    The pdf output is written to %fileout.  It is advisable (but not
  *    required) to have a '.pdf' extension.
  *
- *    The intent is to use pdftoppm to render the images at 150 pixels/inch
- *    for a full page, when scalefactor = 1.0.  The renderer uses the
- *    mediaboxes to decide how big to make the images.  If those boxes
- *    have values that are too large, the intermediate ppm images can
- *    be very large.  To prevent that, we compute the resolution to input
- *    to pdftoppm that results in RGB ppm images representing page images
- *    at about 150 ppi (when scalefactor = 1.0).  These images are about
- *    6MB, but are written quickly because there is no compression.
+ *    As the first step in processing, images are saved in the ./image
+ *    directory as RGB at 300 ppi in ppm format.  Each image is about 26MB.
+ *    Delete those images after use.
  *
  *    N.B.  This requires the Poppler package of pdf utilities, such as
  *          pdfimages and pdftoppm.  For non-unix systems, this requires
@@ -123,21 +91,20 @@ l_int32 main(int    argc,
 char       buf[256];
 char      *basedir, *fname, *tail, *basename, *imagedir, *title, *fileout;
 l_int32    threshold, lrclear, tbclear, edgeclean, lradd, tbadd;
-l_int32    render_res, onebit, savecolor, i, n, ret;
-l_float32  scalefactor;
+l_int32    render_res, i, n, ret;
 SARRAY    *sa;
 
     if (argc != 10)
         return ERROR_INT(
-            "Syntax: croppdf basedir threshold lrclean tbclear edgeclean "
+            "Syntax: croppdf basedir threshold lrclear tbclear edgeclean "
             "lradd tbadd title fileout", __func__, 1);
     basedir = argv[1];
     threshold = atoi(argv[2]);
-    lrclear = atoi(argv[3]);  /* set to 1 to enforce 1 bpp tiffg4 encoding */
-    tbclear = atoi(argv[4]);  /* set to 1 to enforce 1 bpp tiffg4 encoding */
-    edgeclean = atoi(argv[5]);  /* jpeg quality */
-    lradd = atoi(argv[6]);  /* set to 1 to enforce 1 bpp tiffg4 encoding */
-    tbadd = atoi(argv[7]);  /* set to 1 to enforce 1 bpp tiffg4 encoding */
+    lrclear = atoi(argv[3]);
+    tbclear = atoi(argv[4]);
+    edgeclean = atoi(argv[5]);
+    lradd = atoi(argv[6]);
+    tbadd = atoi(argv[7]);
     title = argv[8];
     fileout = argv[9];
     setLeptDebugOK(1);
@@ -184,17 +151,13 @@ SARRAY    *sa;
     }
     sarrayDestroy(&sa);
 
-        /* Optionally binarize, then scale and collect all images in memory.
-         * If n > 100, use pixacomp instead of pixa to store everything
-         * before generating the pdf.
-         * When using the onebit option, It is important to binarize
-         * the images in leptonica.  Do not let 'pdftoppm -mono' do
-         * the binarization, because it will apply error-diffusion
-         * dithering to gray and color images. */
+        /* Process each image and collect all resulting 1 bpp images
+         * in memory.  If n > 200, use pixacomp instead of pixa to
+         * store the images before generating the pdf.  */
     sa = getSortedPathnamesInDirectory(imagedir, NULL, 0, 0);
     lept_free(imagedir);
     sarrayWriteStderr(sa);
-    lept_stderr("compressing ...\n");
+    lept_stderr("croping ...\n");
     cropFilesToPdf(sa, threshold, lrclear, tbclear, edgeclean,
                    lradd, tbadd, title, fileout);
 
diff --git a/src/pdfapp.c b/src/pdfapp.c
index 511bb5fc2..b2b1ea1e9 100644
--- a/src/pdfapp.c
+++ b/src/pdfapp.c
@@ -231,41 +231,29 @@ PIXAC     *pixac1 = NULL;
  * \brief   cropFilesToPdf()
  *
  * \param[in]    sa            sorted full pathnames of images
- * \param[in]    threshold     set to 1 to enforce 1 bpp tiffg4 encoding
- * \param[in]    lr_clear     set to 1 to enforce 1 bpp tiffg4 encoding
- * \param[in]    tb_clear     if %onebit == 1, set to 1 to save color
- * \param[in]    edgeclean   scaling factor applied to each image; > 0.0
- * \param[in]    lr_add       for jpeg: 0 for default (50; otherwise 25 - 95.
- * \param[in]    tb_add       for jpeg: 0 for default (50; otherwise 25 - 95.
+ * \param[in]    threshold     threshold for binarization
+ * \param[in]    lr_clear      full res pixels cleared at left and right sides
+ * \param[in]    tb_clear      full res pixels cleared at top and bottom sides
+ * \param[in]    edgeclean     parameter for removing edge noise (0-15)
+ *                             default = 0 (no removal);
+ * \param[in]    lr_add        full res expansion of crop box on left and right
+ * \param[in]    tb_add        full res expansion of crop box on top and bottom
  * \param[in]    title         [optional] pdf title; can be null
  * \param[in]    fileout       pdf file of all images
  * \return  0 if OK, 1 on error
  *
  * <pre>
  * Notes:
- *    (1) This function is designed to optionally scale and compress a set of
- *        images, wrapping them in a pdf in the order given in the input %sa.
- *    (2) It does the image processing for prog/compresspdf.c.
- *    (3) Images in the output pdf are encoded with either tiffg4 or jpeg (DCT),
- *        or a mixture of them depending on parameters %onebit and %savecolor.
- *    (4) Parameters %onebit and %savecolor work as follows:
- *        %onebit = 0: no depth conversion, default encoding depends on depth
- *        %onebit = 1, %savecolor = 0: all images converted to 1 bpp
- *        %onebit = 1, %savecolor = 1: images without color are converted
- *           to 1 bpp; images with color have the color preserved.
- *    (5) In use, if most of the pages are 1 bpp but some have color that needs
- *        to be preserved, %onebit and %savecolor should both be 1.  This
- *        causes DCT compression of color images and tiffg4 compression
- *        of monochrome images.
- *    (6) The images will be concatenated in the order given in %sa.
- *    (7) The scalefactor is applied to each image before encoding.
- *        If you enter a value <= 0.0, it will be set to 1.0.
- *    (8) Default jpeg quality is 50; otherwise, quality factors between
- *        25 and 95 are enforced.
- *    (9) Page images at 300 ppi are about 8 Mpixels.  RGB(A) rasters are
- *        then about 32 MB (1 bpp images are about 1 MB).  If there are
- *        more than 25 images, store the images after processing as an
- *        array of compressed images (a Pixac); otherwise, use a Pixa.
+ *    (1) This function is designed to optionally remove white space from
+ *        around the page images, and generate a pdf that prints with
+ *        foreground occupying much of the full page.
+ *    (2) It does the image processing for prog/croppdf.c.
+ *    (3) Images in the output pdf are 1 bpp and encoded with tiffg4.
+ *    (4) See documentation in pixCropImage() for details on the processing.
+ *    (5) The images will be concatenated in the order given in %sa.
+ *    (6) Page images at 300 ppi are about 1 Mpixels.  We allow up to 200
+ *        uncompressed rasters to be stored in memory.  If more than 200
+ *        pages, the stored images are compressed with tiffg4.
  * </pre>
  */
 l_ok