Crop PDF
Trim the margins off PDF pages, or cut out just the part you need — right in your browser.
Drag across the page to draw the area to keep. Drag the box to move it, or its handles to resize it.
Your cropped PDF is ready
How to crop a PDF
- Drop a PDF onto the box above, or click it to browse. The first page then appears as a preview.
- Drag across the preview to mark the part you want to keep. Pull a handle to move one edge or corner, drag the box itself to shift it, or type exact margins in millimetres into the four fields underneath.
- If all you want is to lose a white border, press Auto-detect margins. The page is scanned for its outermost marks and the box closes in on them, leaving about a millimetre spare.
- Choose which pages to crop — every page, only the one in the preview, or a range such as 2-6, 9 — and pick a standard or a hard crop.
- Press Crop PDF. The result downloads as yourfile-cropped.pdf.
What people use it for
Plenty of PDFs carry more page than anyone needs. Cropping takes the excess away and leaves the rest exactly as it was.
- Removing wide white margins so a paper or book reads better on a phone or e-reader.
- Trimming the scanner lid, a thumb or a dark shadow off the edges of scanned pages.
- Cutting one chart, table or diagram out of a report so it can go into a slide.
- Taking crop marks and colour bars off a printer's proof.
- Cutting a sheet down to just the shipping label before printing.
Good to know
There are two kinds of crop here, and the difference matters. A standard crop changes the page boxes that tell a viewer which part of each page to show. Nothing is redrawn, so text stays sharp and selectable and the file size hardly moves, but the trimmed area is only hidden: it is still inside the file, and anyone with a PDF editor can bring it back or copy the text out of it. If what you are cutting off is private — an account number in a margin, someone's notes, a name in a header — choose Hard crop. It redraws each cropped page as an image at 200 DPI, so the parts outside the box are gone for good. The price is that text on those pages can no longer be selected or searched, the whole file loses its bookmarks, links and fillable form fields (the document is rebuilt), and the file usually grows, most of all for text documents; Compress PDF can bring it back down.
Margins are measured on the page as you see it, so a page stored sideways still loses its top edge from the top. When several pages are cropped, the same margins come off each one, and any page too small for them is left as it was and named in the status line. None of this involves a server: the page reads your file from disk, does the cropping in your browser's memory and hands the result straight back as a download.
Questions people ask
Can I undo a crop later?
A standard crop can be reversed in a full PDF editor, because the original content is still in the file — which is exactly why it is no way to hide anything. A hard crop cannot be undone, so keep the original if you might want the whole pages back.
Will the printed page be smaller?
The cropped area becomes the new page, so a printer usually scales it up to fill the paper. Choose actual size in the print settings if you want it printed at its real measurements. If a page also needs turning the right way up, Rotate PDF does that separately.
Can I crop each page differently?
Not in one pass. Crop the pages that share a layout first, then load the result again and crop the others with a page range. Pages you do not need at all are easier to drop beforehand with Split PDF, which keeps only the pages you list.
Does auto-detect work on scanned pages?
Usually. It looks for anything clearly darker than white, so a pale grey background and faint specks are ignored, but a dark scanner edge or a punched hole counts as content. Then drag that edge in by hand.