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Crop PDF

Trim the margins of every page, losslessly and reversibly.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded

Drop your PDF here

or click to browse · .pdf

What to expect

  • Cropping sets each page’s crop box. Nothing is deleted, so the operation is reversible.
  • Because the content is still there, cropping must not be used to hide sensitive material.
  • Every page is cropped by the same proportion, so mixed page sizes stay consistent.

Frequently asked questions

Is the cropped-away content really gone?

No — and this is important. Cropping sets a crop box, which tells a reader which part of the page to display. The content outside it is still in the file and can be recovered by anyone who changes the box back. Never use cropping to hide confidential material.

Why are the margins percentages rather than millimetres?

So a document with mixed page sizes crops consistently. A 5% margin trims proportionally on every page, where a fixed 10mm would take a much bigger bite out of a small page than a large one.

Can I undo a crop?

Yes. Because nothing is removed, running the cropped file through a tool that resets the crop box restores the full page. Your original file is also untouched on disk.

Will cropping make the file smaller?

Barely. The hidden content is still stored, so the saving is limited to a few bytes of page metadata. To actually reduce file size, use Compress PDF.

Does this change the printed page size?

Yes. Most printers and viewers honour the crop box, so the document will print at the cropped dimensions rather than the original sheet size.

Trim the margins of a PDF

Cropping is most useful on documents that were produced for paper and are now being read on a screen. A scanned book page surrounded by two inches of white space wastes most of a tablet display; trimming it makes the text usably large without zooming and panning on every page.

It is also the fix for a scan that picked up the edge of the platen, or a slide deck exported with printer margins it does not need.

What cropping actually does — and does not do

Every PDF page has two rectangles that matter here. The media box is the physical sheet. The crop box is the region a reader should display. Cropping sets the crop box; it does not touch the media box and it does not remove anything.

That has one good consequence and one dangerous one. The good one: the operation is completely lossless and completely reversible — no pixels are resampled, no text is re-flowed, and resetting the box brings the full page back. The dangerous one: content you crop away is still in the file, and anyone can recover it.

If your reason for cropping is that something in the margin should not be seen, this tool cannot help you and neither can any other cropping tool. Removing the whole page with Remove PDF Pages genuinely deletes it; cropping never does.

Choosing margins

Margins are given as a percentage of each dimension, so the same setting behaves sensibly across a document that mixes A4 and letter, or portrait and landscape.

Five percent is a light trim that removes obvious white space. Ten to fifteen percent is typical for a scanned book. Beyond about twenty-five percent you are usually cutting into content, which is why the preview shows the proportion of the page that survives.

Related tools

To turn pages rather than trim them, use Rotate PDF. To make the file genuinely smaller, use Compress PDF. To delete whole pages, use Remove PDF Pages.

Related tools

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