Briss alternative

What Briss does well

Briss solves one problem neatly. A PDF on a 6 or 7 inch screen shrinks the whole page, white margins included, so the text ends up tiny. Briss lays pages of the same size on top of each other, shows you where the text sits across all of them, and lets you draw one rectangle. Its GitHub README says the point is exactly this: cut the whitespace so text renders bigger on e-ink screens and tablets.

What it does better than FixMyScan, from its own pages:

• Free and open source. GPL-3.0, with no account and no upload.
• Odd and even pages apart. Books have a wider inner margin on alternating sides, and Briss groups odd and even pages so each gets its own box.
• Several crop regions. The SourceForge page lists cropping different regions into separate pages and cropping multi-column pages.
• A command line. Briss 2.0 can run without the window, with automatic detection: -s source.pdf -d cropped.pdf, plus --split-col and --split-row to cut pages into two columns or two halves.
• Works on any PDF. A born-digital paper with wide margins crops as well as a scan.

If your PDF is already clean text and only the margins are wrong, Briss may be all you need.

Where Briss stops

Briss has two limits worth knowing before you spend an evening on it.

It is old, or in alpha. The original Briss 0.9 on SourceForge was last updated on 20 May 2013. Briss 2.0 on GitHub is developed separately from the original author, and its newest release, v2.0-alpha-5, came out on 4 May 2023. The README says it is in alpha and some features are still missing.

It needs Java. The README asks for Java 8 or later. On a locked-down work laptop, or for someone who has never installed a runtime, that is the step where many people give up.

It only crops. This is the bigger one for scanned books. A scan that came off a library copier or an archive download often has:

• grey or yellowed paper, which e-ink shows as a muddy background
• faint, thin letters
• pages that tilt a degree or two, so a single crop clips some lines
• no text layer, so you cannot search, highlight or look up a word

Briss changes none of that. You get the same grey page, larger.

How FixMyScan handles the same book

The crop works the way Briss users expect: layered pages and one box. The difference is what happens around it.

1. Upload the scan. PDF or DjVu, up to 1,000 pages, in any browser. No Java.
2. Draw the crop once over the layered pages. It applies to every page of the book.
3. Get the finished PDF. Tilted pages are straightened first, so the crop does not clip them. Paper turns white and text turns black. Pages with pictures stay greyscale. Hidden text goes under every word.

Spreads, where one PDF page shows two book pages, are cut into single pages in reading order. Right-to-left books are the exception; choose Don’t split for those.

The result is still a PDF with the original page order and page numbers, so the book looks like the book, just readable at normal size.

Side by side

Briss facts are from its SourceForge page and GitHub README, checked 4 November 2026.

What FixMyScan will not do that Briss can

There is no command line or batch mode for running a folder of PDFs unattended. One book is processed at a time. There is no per-page override either: the whole book gets the one crop you draw.

Your upload is also not local. It stays private to your account and is deleted 24 hours after the book is ready, or 24 hours after upload if you never convert it.

Choosing

Best suited for: Briss if your PDF is clean digital text with wide margins and you are comfortable with Java. FixMyScan if the PDF is a scan and the margins are only one of its problems.

Not sure which kind you have? The free scanned PDF checker tells you in your browser, without uploading the file. If small text is the real complaint, read why scanned text looks tiny on an e-reader.

Questions