Crop PDF
Trim white margins or borders from every page of a PDF.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data never leaves your device — nothing is uploaded to our servers.
About Crop PDF
Cropping a PDF sets a smaller visible window on each page. The important consequence, and the one most tools leave unsaid, is that whatever falls outside that window is still inside the file — hidden from view, not deleted. That's fine for tidying scan margins so a document reads better on a tablet, and it is the wrong tool entirely for hiding sensitive text, which anyone can recover by widening the crop again. Margins are entered in millimetres and applied to every page in the document.
When to use Crop PDF
Removing the black border from a flatbed scan
Scanning a page smaller than the glass leaves a dark frame around it. A few millimetres off each edge removes the frame without touching the page content.
Making a paper-sized PDF readable on an e-reader
A4 pages on a small screen are mostly white margin. Cropping the margins away lets the reader zoom the text to fill the screen instead of the whitespace.
Cutting a repeated header or footer band
Documents exported with a standing header on every page — a banner, a system watermark strip, a printed URL — can have that band cropped off in a single pass.
Limitations worth knowing
- Cropping hides content, it does not remove it. Text and images outside the crop box stay in the file and reappear if the crop is reset — never use this to conceal confidential material.
- One set of margins is applied to every page. A document mixing portrait and landscape pages, or scans that drift across the stack, can't be handled page by page here.
- Margins are measured from each page's existing crop box, so cropping a file twice takes the second set off the already-cropped area rather than off the original sheet.
- Margins that would leave zero or negative width or height are refused with a message asking you to reduce them, rather than producing a file that won't open.
- The file does not get meaningfully smaller. The hidden content is still stored, so cropping is not a way to reduce file size — compress the PDF for that.
- A few printers and older viewers honour the media box rather than the crop box, so a cropped page can still print with its original margins.
How to crop pdf
- 1
Load the PDF you want to crop.
- 2
Enter how many millimetres to take off the top, right, bottom and left. Leave a field at zero to keep that edge as it is.
- 3
The same margins apply to every page, measured from each page's current crop box rather than from the paper size.
- 4
Run the tool and download the result, saved as your-file-cropped.pdf.
Frequently asked questions
Does cropping delete the text I cropped out?+
No, and this matters. Cropping sets a smaller visible area on the page; everything outside it is still stored in the file and comes back if anyone widens the crop box. Copying text out of a cropped PDF can even return the hidden words. If your aim is to remove sensitive content rather than tidy the layout, you need true redaction, not cropping.
Why is my file the same size after cropping?+
Because nothing was thrown away. The page content is unchanged and only the visible window moved, so the byte count barely shifts. If you need a smaller file, run the cropped PDF through Compress PDF afterwards.
Can I crop only some of the pages?+
Not in a single pass — the margins you enter apply to every page. To crop part of a document, extract those pages first, crop the extracted file, then merge it back with the pages you left alone.
How do I work out the right margin in millimetres?+
Start from the paper size and estimate. An A4 page is 210 mm across and 297 mm tall, so a 20 mm border is roughly a tenth of the width. Crop conservatively, open the result, and run it again if more needs to come off — the second pass measures from the already-cropped edge.
Troubleshooting Crop PDF
The tool says the crop margins are larger than the page.
Why it happens: The left and right margins together exceed the page width, or the top and bottom exceed its height, which would leave nothing visible.
How to fix it: Reduce the margins. The values are millimetres, not points or pixels — 200 is wider than an A4 page, while 20 is a realistic scan border.
Some pages cropped correctly and others lost content.
Why it happens: The document mixes page sizes or orientations and one set of margins is applied to all of them, so a margin that trims a portrait page cuts into a landscape one.
How to fix it: Split the document by orientation, crop each part with its own margins, then merge the parts back together.
The crop looks right on screen but the printout still has the old margins.
Why it happens: The output device is honouring the page's media box rather than its crop box. A minority of printers and older viewers behave this way.
How to fix it: Print to PDF from a viewer that respects the crop box, then send that file to the printer.
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