Complex question on resizing, layers, and digitizing from scans

Question

Hi,
I purchased acrobat pro to help me compile my research documents - scans, photos of archival document pages, book copies, etc. - into clean and efficient pdfs. For instance, I buy an ethnography in hardcopy, I jot notes in the margins, and then scan the entire book. (I do not buy ebooks because I don't get the satisfaction of writing in the margins, so this is not an option.) When I scan the book, I will try NOT to OCR my margin notes, as this often bloats the document; having an image of them is fine enough. I then have a digital version of the source I can access from the cloud, make digital notes, extract some lines of text to cite, etc. (I have posted elsewhere of the problem I experience on a Mac using the Preview or Skim apps.)
With these things in mind, the issue I am having is how to resize a single page or pages of a large (460 pp.) document. This might be the perfectionist in me, but it drives me crazy when I have scanned pages that are 8 x 12.50 inches, 7.99 x 12.15 inches, 7.86 x 12.45 inches, and 8.03 x 12.43 inches (and my hunches tell me that whatever app the document is viewed on, whether on an iphone, laptop, etc., it makes the machine work a little harder to present visually a non-standardized document). For me, at least, such documents are also jittery when scrolling in Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Reader. One would intuitively think that the "Reflow" tool would magically fix this, that it would magically make the text and/or images fit a standard page size, but alas it doesn't.
I've tried to follow some of the discussions online, but I've found them either not pertinent to Acrobat XI or not really speaking to my issue since I am NOT trying to print a 460 pp. document just to re-scan it. So I have tried to go into crop and change the page sizes to custom, this doesn't work. When doing this, I notice that the page image changes sizes and position, but the embedded text remains the same size and stays in the same position - so the two somehow get unsynced in size and position. Weird. Perhaps this is an issue I can resolve by re-running OCR or just making sure that I create the pdfs as an "searchable image, exact?" This could take much time and effort, so advice on this particular item would be helpful.
Additionally, let me give some more background about this specific file giving me grief. I have one page that I had to insert from a digital pdf obtained from my library. (My hardcopy page has way too much scribbling to OCR properly.) For anyone who has university access to digital ebooks, you will know the library allows you to "Print" a given sample of pages, usually a max of 50-60 pp. When these pages go to "Print," you can save them as pdf. Either way, the technology used puts a header and footer on each page, usually with the date, time, website source, loggin info, etc. 1st question: when this happens, are different "layers" produced (i.e. a flat and large white sheet w/ header and footer being a background "layer" while the text or page image is another layer on top of it)? Can someone help me better understand this process so that I can manipulate the elements better? 2nd question: I have tried to delete the image of this large white header/footer "layer" (as I'm calling it). Apparently it gets cropped out of view fine. But the damn thing is still there - can't I remove that "layer" and simply resize the second "layer" of the text image to fit the size of the pages before and after? And can I do it without having the text image and the embedded fonts un-sync? That seems like a simple request!
Many thanks for any input. This is likely the first in a series of posts to help me standardize my use of Acrobat Pro and my workflow! I can provide a copy of the page (extracted, if you wish) in question.

Answer 1

If you are on a campus network, I would not network attach your hard drive unless you either plan on sharing the data on it or setup some sort of firewall.
The easiest way to do what you want would be to:
1) Get a normal home wireless router and attach it to the campus lan (check your campus computer policy to make sure you won't get shot for this)
2) Configure the router to do 'DHCP' on the WAN side (that will be towards the campus lan and act just like if it were the PC you have attached now).
3) Configure wireless on the router and ensure it is secured (WPA Personal encryption with a decent key)
4) Attach both your computers to the router either by wireless or wired. They will now have '192.168.x.x' addresses more than likely rather than the campus IPs since that is now on your routers WAN.
5) Enable File Sharing and Printer Sharing on the mac mini.
6) Under Security on the mac mini, you should probably turn on your firewall as well if it isn't already. There should be a hole poked in it for file/printer sharing already.
7) You should now see the mini from your other system under Finder since you're on the same network. If you can't, hit Option-K and type in 'afp://192.168.x.x/' where x.x is replaced with the IP address of your mini.
... and that should be it. From there, it's just a matter of adding printers, etc. which you should be able to do once you are connected fairly easily.