Crop PDF pages

Why crop a PDF

Many PDFs carry more paper than content. A scanned receipt sits in the corner of a whole A4 sheet, a slide exported from a presentation has a wide white frame, an academic paper has margins that waste half the screen of an e-reader or a tablet, and a page cut from a book scan shows the dark edge of the scanner lid. Cropping cuts that away so the part you need fills the screen and the printout. This tool does it in two ways. Trim white margins looks at every page and keeps the area where something is drawn, with two millimetres of white around it, so pages of different layouts each get their own fit. Cut the same margins takes off a fixed number of millimetres at the top, bottom, left and right of every page, which keeps all pages the same size. A preview of the first page shows what is kept, and you can drag on it to mark the area instead of typing numbers. Limit the crop to certain pages if only some need it.

How to crop a PDF

1. Drop your PDF in the box, or click to choose it.
2. Keep Trim white margins automatically, or choose to cut the same margins and type them in millimetres or drag on the page preview.
3. Click Crop PDF and download the cropped file.

What changes when you convert

Cropping hides, it does not delete

The tool sets the crop box of each page, the frame that PDF readers show and print. Everything outside it is still in the file: text there can be found by a search or copied out, and a PDF editor can bring it back by resetting the crop box. Do not use cropping to remove private information such as an account number or a signature; black it out with a redaction tool instead.

The file does not get smaller

Because the hidden parts stay in the file, the size stays about the same. If the goal is a smaller file, run it through a PDF compressor afterwards; cropping and compressing are separate steps.

What counts as a white margin

Anything clearly darker than white counts as content, including page numbers, headers, footers and the grey edge of a scan. If a page number sits far down in the corner, the automatic crop keeps the space down to it. On scans with a grey background nothing is white, so use fixed margins there instead.

Pages of different sizes

Automatic trimming fits every page to its own content, so the cropped pages can end up with different sizes. That is fine on screen. If the pages must match, for example for printing a booklet, cut the same margins from every page instead.

Rotated pages and forms

The margins always refer to the page as you see it, so a page stored sideways is cropped at the top you see, not at the top of its stored layout. Links, bookmarks and form fields stay in the file; fields that lie outside the new frame are no longer visible.