PDF Tools
Crop PDF
Drag a rectangle over the page, or set each edge as a percentage, and save a PDF trimmed to what you want to keep.
Overview
Why use a free PDF cropper?
This free PDF cropper trims the edges off a page. Open a document, drag the rectangle over the part you want to keep or type a percentage for each edge, choose whether it applies to every page or a range, and save the result.
Cropping is the fix for a specific and very common annoyance: a scan with black borders down one side, a slide deck exported with wide letterboxing, a statement with an enormous header, a page photographed with the desk in shot. In all of those the content is fine and the boundary is wrong, and changing the boundary costs nothing in quality because nothing on the page is redrawn.
It is worth knowing what cropping does not do before you rely on it. Trimming a page hides the part outside the box rather than deleting it, and everything hidden is still in the file for anyone who resets the boundary. That makes this the right tool for margins and the wrong one for anything confidential, which is a distinction most free croppers leave you to discover on your own.
Everything happens in your browser. The file is opened, previewed and rewritten on your own device and nothing is transmitted, which matters more than usual here because the documents that need cropping are so often scans of things you would not upload.
Step by step
How to crop a PDF and keep what matters
Open your PDF
The first page is shown as it will look, with the page's own rotation already applied.
Set the window you want to keep
Drag the corners of the rectangle, or type a percentage for each edge. The four fields and the rectangle are the same setting.
Choose the pages
Leave the page box blank to crop the whole document, or type a range like 1-3, 5, 8- to crop only part of it.
Save the cropped PDF
The crop box and the page size are both written, so the file looks the same on screen and on paper.
What you get
- Drag the corners, or type each edge exactly
- Crop every page or just a range
- Percentages, so mixed page sizes crop consistently
- Lossless. Nothing on the page is redrawn
- Runs entirely in your browser, no uploads
Background
What a crop box actually changes
Every PDF page carries two rectangles that matter here. The media box is the sheet: the full extent of the page as it would be printed. The crop box is the part a viewer is asked to display, and where a document sets one, that is what you see when you open it. Cropping a PDF means changing the crop box, and this tool changes the media box to match so that the page is the same size on screen and on paper.
Nothing else is touched. The text, images and vector instructions that make up the page are exactly as they were, which is why cropping is lossless: no re-rendering, no recompression, text still selectable and searchable, images at their original resolution. It is also why the file barely shrinks. A page trimmed by half is not half the size, because the content outside the box is still stored in it.
That last point has a consequence worth stating plainly. Content you crop away is still in the document. It is not visible, and text extraction on the cropped page will not return it, so a cropped file can look convincingly clean. But the page contents were never edited: restoring the two rectangles brings every character back, and that is a few seconds' work for anyone who thinks to try it. A name, an address, a price or a signature cropped off a page has not left the file.
So there are two different jobs with two different tools. Trimming a margin, a border or a header is what cropping is for and it does it perfectly well. Removing something from a document is redaction, which means deleting the underlying content, or removing the page entirely, and if the choice is between cropping something out and sending the original, take the page out.
One more thing to expect: cropping changes the page's proportions, and printers will then scale it. A page trimmed to a shape that is not the paper's shape comes out with wide margins somewhere, or shrunk to fit. That is not a fault in the file, but it is worth checking the print preview before sending a cropped document to be printed rather than read.
Not to be confused with
- Cropping and redacting
- Cropping changes which part of the page is displayed. Redaction removes the content itself. They look identical on screen and are completely different files, and only one of them is safe to send when something on the page should not travel with it.
- Cropping and covering with a box
- Drawing a filled rectangle over text is worse than cropping, not better. The text sits underneath, selectable and copyable, and the black box gives a stronger impression of safety than a crop does. Both hide; neither removes.
- Cropping and resizing
- Cropping cuts the page down and leaves the content at its original scale. Resizing keeps the whole page and scales everything to a new sheet size. If the goal is to fit A3 content onto A4, scaling is the operation you want, not this one.
- Cropping and deleting pages
- Cropping works within a page. If a whole page should not be in the document, removing it is both simpler and genuinely effective, because the page and everything on it leaves the file rather than being hidden inside it.
- The crop box and the media box
- The first is what a viewer displays, the second is the sheet it sits on. Tools that set only the crop box produce a file that looks right on screen and prints at the original size. Both are written here so the two agree.
Reference
What to check before you save
Your original file is never modified, so an unwanted crop costs nothing but a second attempt. These are the things that are easy to get wrong and awkward to notice afterwards.
Whether cropping is the right operation at all
If the reason for trimming is that something on the page should not be seen by the recipient, stop here. Cropping will not achieve it. Remove the page, or redact the content properly in an editor that deletes it.
Required
The other pages, not just the first
The preview shows one page and the crop applies to all of them unless you say otherwise. Documents are rarely as consistent as their first page suggests, and a margin that is generous on page one can be tight on page seven.
Required
Headers, footers and page numbers
These live in exactly the margins people trim. Losing them is often intended and sometimes not, particularly page numbers in a document that will be printed and read on paper.
Required
Pages that are a different size
A document assembled from several sources often has pages of different dimensions. Percentages handle that far better than fixed measurements, but a landscape page among portrait ones will still crop differently from what you saw.
Optional
Anything printed close to the edge
Signatures, reference numbers, barcodes and stamps sit near the boundary more often than body text does. They are the first things to disappear under a generous trim and the last things you want to lose.
Optional
How it will print
A cropped page has different proportions from standard paper, so a printer will scale it or pad it. If the document is going to be printed rather than read on screen, check the preview before sending it.
Optional
Whether the file needed to be smaller
Cropping barely reduces file size, because the hidden content is still stored. If size was the reason for trimming, compress the document instead. That is the operation that actually removes data.
Optional
Digital signatures
A signature covers the document as it was signed, and changing the page boundaries invalidates it. If a signed file must remain verifiable, leave it alone and send it as it is.
Optional
The file name
The download is named after your original with a suffix. That is enough to tell two versions apart in a downloads folder and not enough for a recipient, so rename it before attaching it to anything.
Optional
Who it helps
Who needs to crop PDF pages?
Anyone scanning paper
Flatbed scans come with black borders, phone photographs come with the desk in shot, and feeders leave a strip down one edge. Trimming turns a document that looks careless into one that looks deliberate, and changes nothing about what it says.
Anyone working with slide decks
Slides exported to PDF arrive at presentation proportions and print with wide bands of white above and below. Cropping to the slide itself is what makes a deck usable as a handout.
Small businesses and freelancers
Statements with enormous branded headers, invoices from suppliers with half a page of footer, receipts photographed at an angle. These get filed and forwarded as they are because tidying them looked like more work than it is.
Bookkeepers and accountants
Client paperwork arrives in whatever state the client's phone left it in. Trimming on the way in makes a document readable at a glance for everyone who opens it afterwards, which is usually several people.
Students and academics
Scanned book chapters and journal articles carry margins wider than the text. Cropping them makes the difference between something readable on a tablet and something you have to pinch and drag through every page.
Anyone preparing documents for a bundle
A set of documents from different sources with wildly different margins looks assembled by accident. Bringing them closer to a common shape is a small thing that makes a bundle look considered.
Do it properly
Best practices
Never crop to hide something
It does not work, and it fails in a way that looks like success. If a document contains something the recipient should not see, remove the page or redact the content properly: cropping leaves every character of it in the file.
Check a middle page before you save
The preview shows one page and the setting usually applies to all of them. Documents drift: margins change between sections, and a landscape page among portrait ones crops differently from what you were looking at.
Leave more margin than looks necessary
A trim that clears the text by a hair on the page you are looking at will clip something on a page you are not. Margins that look slightly generous on screen are usually right across a whole document.
Use the fields when precision matters
Dragging is quick and approximate. When the same trim has to be applied consistently, or matched to a previous document, typing the four percentages is exact and repeatable in a way that a rectangle dragged by hand is not.
Crop before merging, not after
Trimming each document while it is still separate lets each one get the margin it needs. A merged bundle can only take one setting, which will be wrong for some of what is in it.
Compress if the goal was a smaller file
Cropping hides content rather than removing it, so it saves almost nothing. Compression is the operation that reduces the data in the file, and the two are often confused because both make a document feel lighter.
Avoid these
Common mistakes
Cropping to remove confidential information
Content outside the crop box is still in the document and comes back the moment somebody resets the boundary. Remove the page, or redact properly in an editor that deletes the underlying text and images. If neither is possible, send the original and explain.
Drawing a black box over text and calling it redacted
The text is underneath and can be selected and copied straight out of the file. This is the same mistake as cropping, with more confidence attached to it. Only removing the content itself removes the content.
Cropping to make a file smaller
It barely helps, because the hidden content is still stored. Use compression, which actually reduces the data (downsampling images and re-encoding streams), and expect a much larger difference than trimming ever produces.
Judging the crop from the first page alone
Step through a few pages before saving, especially in the middle and at the end. Margins vary between sections of a document far more often than the first page suggests, and the crop applies to all of them.
Trimming so tightly that the text touches the edge
Leave a margin. Text against the boundary is uncomfortable to read on screen and risks being clipped by a printer, which needs a margin of its own: the tight crop that looked precise becomes a page with words cut off.
Assuming a cropped document prints as it appears
The page is now a different shape from the paper, so printers scale or pad it. If the document is going to be printed, check the print preview rather than the on-screen view before sending it anywhere.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
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