Crop PDF
Trim margins and resize the visible area.
How to use Crop PDF
- 01
Upload your PDF
Add the document with margins or whitespace you want to trim — scanned pages, slides with borders, or any PDF with excess space.
- 02
Set the crop area
Adjust the crop box by dragging handles or entering exact measurements. The preview updates in real time so you can see exactly what will be kept.
- 03
Download the cropped PDF
Apply the crop to all pages (or selected pages) and download the trimmed PDF.
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About Crop PDF
Crop whitespace and margins from your PDF pages by adjusting the visible area, then apply it across the whole document. Processed locally for complete privacy.
Trimming away what you do not need
PDFs often carry more whitespace than the content requires. Scanned books have wide binding margins. Presentation slides exported to PDF inherit the slide's border and background. Engineering drawings have title blocks that take up a quarter of the page. Cropping removes the excess, leaving a document that shows only the content that matters — cleaner for reading on screen, more efficient for printing, and better looking when embedded in another document.
This tool adjusts the visible area of each page without re-rendering or re-compressing anything. You set the crop boundary, preview the result, and download a PDF whose pages show only the region you defined. The operation is fast and lossless: the underlying content is unchanged, only the viewing window moves.
How cropping works in a PDF
Every PDF page has several box definitions — MediaBox (the physical page), CropBox (the visible area), and others for printing. When you crop here, the tool updates the CropBox so that viewers display only the region you selected. The data outside the new CropBox is still present in the file, just hidden.
This distinction matters: cropping is not redaction. If a page contains sensitive information near the edge, cropping will hide it from view but a determined person with a PDF editor could widen the CropBox and see it again. For permanent removal, use the Redact tool instead. Cropping is for trimming whitespace, margins, and borders — not for hiding content.
When to crop and practical tips
Students crop lecture slides to remove the professor's branding border, making the content larger and easier to read on a tablet. Designers crop PDF proofs to the artwork area before placing them in a layout. Researchers crop journal papers to remove headers and footers before combining them into a reading pack. Office workers crop scanned documents to remove the scanner's shadow edges.
For best results, zoom in to the preview and align the crop boundary precisely with the content edge. If you are cropping a scanned document with slightly different page positions, set a uniform margin that works for the most-shifted page so no content is accidentally clipped. And after cropping, if the file needs to be smaller, follow up with the Compress tool — cropping alone does not change the file size significantly because the underlying data is retained.
Questions
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Does cropping permanently remove content?
Cropping changes the visible area by adjusting the page's crop box. The content outside the crop area is hidden, not deleted. Some PDF editors can restore the original view, so do not rely on cropping for redaction — use the Redact tool for that.
Can I crop each page differently?
You can set a uniform crop for all pages, which is the most common use case — trimming the same margin from every page of a scanned book or presentation.
Will it reduce the file size?
Cropping alone does not significantly reduce file size because the hidden content is still stored in the file. To reduce size, use the Compress tool after cropping.
Is the cropping done locally?
Yes. The crop is applied entirely in your browser. Your PDF is never uploaded to any server.