How to crop a PDF: trim white margins, crop some pages or all of them
Crop a PDFWide white margins waste screen space on a phone, a scanned page often carries a dark strip from the scanner lid, and sometimes only one table or diagram on a page matters. Cropping fixes all three by changing the part of each page that viewers and printers show. This guide explains how to crop a PDF with Crop PDF without uploading it, when to let it trim margins automatically and when to draw the frame yourself, how to crop only some pages or many files at once, and the one thing cropping is not: a way to delete content.
What cropping a PDF actually changes
Every PDF page has a media box, which is the sheet, and usually a crop box, which is the part a viewer or printer shows. Cropping makes those boxes smaller. Crop PDF sets the media box and crop box to the area you keep, and sets the trim, bleed and art boxes to the same area when a page has them, so screen viewers, printers and print shops all agree on the new size.
Nothing on the page is redrawn. Text, fonts, pictures and vector drawings stay exactly as they were, so the kept part looks the same, text stays selectable and searchable, and quality cannot drop. That is the difference from taking a screenshot of a page or exporting it to an image and cutting that: those turn the page into pixels, and the text is gone.
Trim white margins automatically
- Open Crop PDF and add the file, or up to 20 files. Every page appears as a card.
- Click Trim margins and choose Each page to its own content, or All to the same size.
- Check the cards: the part that will be cut is faded. Then click Save cropped PDF and download the result.
Trim margins renders each page small on your device, finds the rows and columns that contain anything darker than paper, and crops to that area with a thin border. Each page to its own content suits documents whose pages differ, such as a mix of portrait text and landscape charts, but the pages can end up different sizes. All to the same size uses one frame, the smallest that keeps the content of every page, so the document keeps a single page size; that is usually the better choice for anything that will be printed or read as a book.
Automatic trimming treats anything darker than paper as content. Isolated dust specks are ignored, but a page number in a corner, a running header, a stamp or a scanner's dark edge all count, so the margin next to them stays. Crop those pages by hand, as described next. Blank pages are left as they are.
Draw the frame yourself
Click Crop pages, or a card's crop button, or press C, to open the crop editor with a large view of the page. Drag the frame to the area you want, or type how many millimetres to cut from each side when you need exact values, for example to remove a 12 mm binding margin. Fit to content in the editor does the same as automatic trimming for the pages the frame applies to, and you can adjust its result before applying it.
Then choose where the frame goes: this page, the selected pages or all pages. A frame applied to several pages is stored as a share of each page, so it fits pages of different sizes in the same way rather than cutting a fixed number of points from each. Pages you rotated are cropped as you see them on screen.
Crop some pages, or many PDFs at once
To crop only part of a document, select the pages first: click them, Shift-click for a range, or use Select with Odd pages, Even pages or Pages by number. Then apply the frame to the selected pages. Pages you do not crop keep their full size, which is useful when a report has one oversized appendix page or a scanned book has wider margins on the left-hand pages than on the right.
- Several files: add up to 20 PDFs, 50 MB each and 200 MB combined, 300 pages per file. Crop pages with All pages applies one frame to every page of every file; Trim margins trims every page separately.
- Each file is saved separately with -cropped added to its name, and files you did not crop are skipped. Download them one by one or as a ZIP.
- To keep part of a page as a picture, crop first and send the result to PDF to Image, which saves each cropped page as a JPG or PNG.
- To make the file smaller, send the result to Compress PDF; cropping on its own keeps the file about the same size.
What cropping does not do
Cropping hides the edges of a page; it does not delete them. The content outside the crop is still inside the file, which is also why the file size barely changes, and anyone with a PDF editor can enlarge the page again and see it. Never use cropping to remove an account number, a signature or a name before sharing a document. That needs redaction, which removes the content itself, and Crop PDF is not a redaction tool.
Encrypted or password-protected PDFs are refused until you remove the password with Unlock PDF, and digitally signed documents and XFA forms are refused because rewriting them would break the encryption or invalidate the signature. Everything else is kept when a file keeps its pages in order: bookmarks, internal links, annotations, editable form fields and metadata. The file is read and cropped in your browser, nothing is uploaded, and your original is not modified.