Crop PDF
Crop a PDF by dragging a box over the page. One box can govern the whole document, or any page can have its own before you download.
Drag & drop your file here, or
Doing it
- Drop the document into the PDF file box. The page count appears just underneath, and every page renders into a stack you can scroll.
- Drag across a page to mark what stays. Grab a corner or an edge handle to fine-tune it, or drag from inside the box to slide the whole thing somewhere else.
- Glance at the summary line as you work. It says whether one crop is covering every page, or how many pages have gone their own way.
- Untick Same crop on every page when one page needs different treatment. The Use the shared crop here button undoes that page's box and hands it back to the shared one.
- Type something like 1-3, 5 into Pages if only part of the file should change, then press Crop & download.
About this tool
Two things usually send someone hunting for a crop tool: a scan with three centimetres of white around the text, and a slide deck exported to PDF that kept its presenter borders. To crop a PDF here, drop the file in and drag a box across any page of the preview. Whatever falls outside that box stops showing. The box opens as a 10% inset on all four sides, which is close to an ordinary margin trim already, and you pull the corners from there. Focus a handle with the keyboard and each arrow press shifts it half a percent.
One box governs the whole document by default, and the line beside the download button keeps score: One crop, applied to all 12 pages. Untick Same crop on every page and any page you drag on gets a dashed box of its own while the rest carry on with the shared one. What ends up written into the file is the CropBox entry, the same mechanism a reader uses when it shows you a trimmed page. Text stays selectable and images keep their resolution, because no page is re-rendered.
A letter, start to finish
Say a council letter came off the scanner with a 2 cm white band on every side. Load scan.pdf, the hint under the picker reads 6 pages, and the default box is already sitting inside that band. Pull the bottom edge up a little so the fax footer on page one falls outside it, then scroll down and check the box still clears the text on pages 2 to 6.
Leave Pages empty so all six get the same treatment and press Crop & download. Back comes scan-cropped.pdf, and on a phone the text now fills the screen instead of floating in white.
Good to know
- You draw the box by eye against the rendered page. There is no field for typing an exact margin in millimetres, and the smallest box you can pull is 5% of the page in each direction.
- The trimmed area is hidden rather than deleted. Setting a CropBox only tells readers where to stop drawing, so a PDF editor can widen it again. If something in the margin has to be gone for good, send the cropped file through PDF to JPG and rebuild it with Image to PDF.
Frequently asked questions
How do I crop a PDF without Acrobat?
Drag a box over a page, scroll the stack to see how that box sits on the rest, then press Crop & download. What you get is an ordinary PDF that opens anywhere, named after your file with -cropped on the end.
Can each page have its own crop?
Untick Same crop on every page, then drag on the pages that need something different. Those pages show a dashed outline so you can spot them while scrolling. Any page you never touch keeps the shared box, which means nothing gets left at full size by accident.
Is the content outside the box really gone?
No. A CropBox tells the reader where to stop drawing, and the rest of the page data stays in the file, so somebody with an editor can widen it back out. For a genuine removal, export the cropped pages with PDF to JPG and rebuild them with Image to PDF, which flattens each page into a picture.
On my phone, dragging just scrolls the page. How do I draw a box?
Touch devices get a small Scroll and Draw crop switch above the pages, and it starts on Scroll so you can read the document normally. Tap Draw crop and your finger draws the box instead of scrolling. Tap Scroll again when you want to move down the file.
Can I crop just the first three pages?
Put 1-3 in the Pages field and only those three get a new page box; the rest of the document is written back exactly as it arrived. The field takes a mixed list too, so 1-3, 5 works.
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