Crop PDF

About cropping a PDF

A scan comes out with two centimetres of grey around the page. A slide deck printed to PDF has a band of white down one side. A scanned book has the edge of the next page in shot. The content is fine; the frame around it is not.

Cropping fixes it, and Acrobat charges for it. Nothing built into Windows does it at all.

Drop the PDF in, drag a box around what you want to keep, and save. Or press one button and let it find the margins for you.

How to use it

• Click Click to upload or drop your PDF on the page
• Drag across the page to choose the part to keep — everything outside the box dims, so you see the result rather than the selection
• Or press Trim white margins to have the edges found automatically
• Choose whether it applies to every page, only this page, or a range like 1-3, 7
• Press Crop PDF and download

What "crop" really means in a PDF

Worth knowing, because it explains both the good and the bad of what happens.

A PDF page carries two rectangles. The MediaBox is the sheet of paper. The CropBox is the part a reader actually shows. Cropping sets the CropBox, and that is what every PDF tool means by the word.

Two things follow:

• Nothing is re-rendered. The page is not turned into a picture. Text stays selectable and searchable, a scan keeps its exact quality, and the file does not get bigger
• Nothing is deleted. What is outside the box is still in the file — it is just not displayed. That is fine for tidying a margin. It is not a way to hide something. To actually remove content, use Redact PDF

Trim white margins

The button looks at the page as it is drawn and finds where the content actually stops, then crops to it with a few points of breathing room.

It works on what it can see, so a near-white scan is still treated as blank and a page with a faint background wash will trim less. On a page it thinks is completely blank it says so rather than cropping to nothing.

One box, pages of different sizes

The box you drag is stored as a proportion of the page, not as a fixed measurement. So on a document that mixes A4 and Letter, or portrait and landscape, each page is cropped in the same proportion rather than the smaller ones losing content.

Rotated pages are handled too. A page saved at 90° has its own idea of which way is up, and the conversion from your selection to the page is done by the PDF engine rather than guessed, so the crop lands where you drew it.

What people use it for

• Cutting the grey border off a scan
• Removing the white margin from slides printed to PDF
• Trimming a screenshot PDF down to the part that matters
• Cropping statements or invoices to the table before printing
• Getting a book scan down to the page itself with the neighbouring page cut off
• Making a PDF fit better on an e-reader or tablet, where margins waste screen

Good to know

• The file never leaves your device — reading, previewing and cropping all happen in the page
• The original PDF on your disk is untouched; you download a new file
• Text stays real text, and image quality is exactly as it was
• Cropping is reversible in any tool that can reset the CropBox — nothing has been thrown away
• A password-protected PDF has to be unlocked first — use Unlock PDF
• Works on a phone and tablet: drag with your finger

Related tools

• Redact PDF — when the point is to remove content, not hide the edges
• Split PDF — take out a range of pages instead of part of a page
• Rotate PDF — fix pages that are sideways before cropping
• Compress PDF — make the file smaller once it is the right shape
• Organize PDF Pages — put the pages in the right order