Why crop a PDF?
- Huge margins. Academic papers and old scans often have wide white borders. Crop them off and the text gets bigger on a phone or e-reader.
- Scanner bed junk. Scanned a small receipt on a full-size scanner? Crop down to just the receipt.
- Pulling out one piece. Want just the chart, the map or the floor plan from a page? Crop around it.
- Removing printer marks. Print-ready PDFs sometimes come with crop marks and bleed. Trim them for screen viewing.
How it works
You see a big preview of the page. Drag a box over the area you want to keep. Grab the edges or corners to fine-tune. Then choose:
- All pages applies the same box to every page. Perfect for trimming consistent margins.
- This page only crops just the page you're looking at. Use the arrows to move to another page and crop it differently if you want.
Hit Save and download your cropped PDF.
Important: cropping hides, it doesn't delete
This is true for basically every PDF cropping tool, including Acrobat, and it's worth knowing. Cropping a PDF sets a "crop box," a frame that tells PDF readers which part of the page to show. The stuff outside the box is hidden, but it's still in the file. Someone with a PDF editor could reset the crop box and see it again.
So don't use crop to hide private info, like an account number or address at the edge of a page. If you need something truly gone, there are two decent options:
- Crop, then run the file through Compress PDF on Medium. That redraws each page as an image of only what's visible, so the hidden parts really are gone (text stops being selectable, though).
- Or crop, then convert to JPG and back with JPG to PDF. Same idea.
Does cropping lower quality?
No. Nothing is redrawn or resampled. The page stays exactly as sharp as before, and text stays selectable. It just shows less of it. The file size stays about the same, since nothing is actually removed.
Tips
- When cropping all pages, check a few pages before saving. Odd and even pages in a book scan often have different margins, so a box that fits page 1 might clip page 2.
- Leave a little breathing room around text. A crop that touches the letters looks cramped.
- Pages came out sideways? Rotate them first, then crop.
Cropping for e-readers and phones
Reading a PDF on a phone or Kindle is miserable when every page has an inch of white space around it. Cropping all pages down to the text block makes everything noticeably bigger on a small screen. For book scans, try this: crop odd pages with one box and even pages with another, since the inner margin is on opposite sides. Use "This page only" and work through them, or split the odd and even pages into separate files first and crop each in one go.
Will it print the cropped size?
Most printers and print dialogs respect the crop box, so they print only the visible part, usually scaled to fit the paper. If you want the cropped area printed at its true size, look for an "Actual size" option in the print dialog.
Nothing uploaded
Cropping happens in your browser. Your PDF stays on your device the whole time.