How to Crop a PDF and Trim White Margins or Scan Edges
Trim wide margins, dark scan borders or printer marks from every page of a PDF. Drag a crop box or type exact sizes in mm or inches. Free, no upload.
Quick answer
- Open Crop PDF, drag the edges of the crop box over the first page (or type the margins), then click Crop & Download.
- The same margins are trimmed from every page, so it suits scans, slides and reports with a consistent layout.
- Cropping hides what's outside the box but doesn't delete it — never use it to remove confidential information.
Scanned book pages with a dark shadow down the spine, lecture slides with a thick frame, academic papers whose wide margins make the text tiny on a phone or e-reader. Cropping trims those edges so the part you care about fills the screen or the page.
How to crop a PDF
- 1
Open Crop PDF
Go to Crop PDF and add your file. The first page opens in the crop editor.
- 2
Drag the crop box
Pull the edges or corners of the blue box in to the area you want to keep. Everything outside it is shaded. You can also drag the whole box to move it.
- 3
Fine-tune with numbers
Type exact margins for the top, right, bottom and left in mm, in or pt. The panel shows page 1's original size and its size after cropping.
- 4
Crop and download
Click Crop & Download. The new file's name ends in -cropped.pdf, and your original isn't changed.
Drag to crop or type exact margins — the file stays on your device.
Crop your PDFHow the crop is applied to every page
You set the crop on page 1, and the same margins are trimmed from the edges of every page. Margins are measured from what you see, so landscape pages and pages saved rotated are cropped consistently too.
If a page is too small for those margins to leave a usable area, it's left uncropped, and the results screen tells you how many pages were skipped.
Need one page cropped differently? Pull it out with Extract PDF Pages, crop it on its own, and put the parts back together with Merge PDF.
Cropping is not redaction
Good to know: Crop PDF works like the crop tool in most PDF editors: it changes the visible area of each page. The trimmed content is hidden by PDF viewers and printers, but it's still inside the file, and someone with editing software can bring it back. Don't crop to remove names, account numbers or anything else confidential.
For the same reason, cropping rarely makes a file much smaller. If the file is too big to send, run the cropped PDF through Compress PDF afterwards.
Crop, resize or add margins?
| You want to… | Use | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Cut away borders, margins or marks | Crop PDF | The page gets smaller; the content stays the same size |
| Change pages to A4, Letter or Legal | Resize PDF | The page changes size and the content is scaled to fit |
| Add white space for binding or notes | Add Margins | The page gets bigger around the existing content |
These work well together. To turn a scanned book into clean A4 pages, crop the dark edges first with Crop PDF, then use Resize PDF to fit each page onto A4.
Tips for a clean crop
- Leave a little breathing space. Cropping right up to the text looks cramped, and scanned pages are rarely in exactly the same position. A few millimetres of margin covers that.
- Check a few pages before you send it. The editor shows page 1; open the downloaded file and look at pages further in, especially in scans.
- Printing a cropped PDF? The cropped page is smaller than a sheet of paper. Choose Fit to page (or Fit) in the print dialog to scale it up to fill the sheet.
- Password-protected PDFs need unlocking first with Unlock PDF.
Frequently asked questions
Does cropping a PDF reduce its quality?
No. Only the visible area of each page changes. Text, images and drawings aren't redrawn, so they stay as sharp as the original and text stays selectable.
Can I crop just one page of a PDF?
Crop PDF applies the same margins to every page. To crop a single page, extract it into its own file, crop it, then merge it back with the other pages.
Does cropping permanently remove the hidden parts?
No. The content outside the crop is hidden, not deleted, so it can be recovered with PDF editing software. Don't use cropping to hide sensitive information.
Is my PDF uploaded when I crop it?
No. Crop PDF works inside your browser, so the file never leaves your device.