Crop PDF
Trim margins and resize your PDF pages.
Drop a PDF to trim its margins
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Trim margins and resize your PDF pages.
or click to browse
Nothing is uploaded. The PDF is read, cropped and written back inside this tab, which is why the whole thing finishes in about as long as it takes to read this paragraph.
PDF measures everything in points. One point is 1⁄72 of an inch, so 72 points is an inch and roughly 28 points is a centimetre. The page sizes you already know translate like this:
Points are the unit the file itself stores, so typing them directly means no conversion happens between what you ask for and what you get. A few useful reference values: a standard one-inch document margin is 72 points, the white band at the top of most scans runs 20 to 40 points, and a browser's printed header and footer usually eat about 50 points at each end.
If you would rather work by eye, start with 40 in one box, crop, and look at the output. Adjust from there. Your original file is never modified, so iterating costs nothing.
Every PDF page carries two rectangles. The MediaBox is the physical sheet the page was designed for. The CropBox is the window a viewer or printer is told to show. This tool sets the CropBox, which is exactly how professional prepress software crops, and it has three consequences worth knowing.
Nothing is re-rendered. Text stays selectable and searchable, fonts stay embedded, vector art stays vector, and images keep their original pixels. A cropped page is every bit as sharp as the page you started with — unlike a screenshot-and-reassemble approach, which flattens everything to pixels and loses the text layer.
It is reversible. The trimmed region is still in the file, simply outside the display window. That is useful when you overshoot: crop the same file again with smaller numbers and the material comes back.
It changes the display area, not the byte count. Expect the file size to stay roughly where it was. When the goal is a smaller file, Compress PDF is the tool that moves that number — it recompresses embedded photos while leaving text sharp, and its Scanned Document mode routinely cuts scans by around 10×.
For material that must be genuinely unrecoverable — an address, an account number, a name — Redact PDF removes the underlying content rather than hiding it, which is the right tool for anything sensitive.
Flatbed and phone scans nearly always carry a strip of scanner lid or desk along one or two edges. Twenty to fifty points off the offending sides tidies the whole document in one pass.
Slide decks exported for handouts often sit in a wide white frame. Cropping to the slide itself makes them fill a tablet screen properly instead of floating in space.
This is where cropping earns its keep. Academic papers and books carry generous margins designed for print, and on a six-inch screen those margins are most of the display. Trim 50 to 70 points off each side and the text reflows to a genuinely readable size without any zooming and panning.
Browser print-to-PDF stamps a URL and timestamp into the top and bottom margins. Around 50 points off each end removes both cleanly.
Bank statements often reserve a third of the page for promotional panels. Cropping to the transaction table alone makes a year's worth of statements far quicker to scan through later.
When a printer asks for a specific trim size, setting the CropBox is precisely what they expect. The page geometry is described in the file rather than approximated by hand.
One trim is applied to every page, which is the right behaviour for the common case — a document scanned in a single session has the same border everywhere. Mixed documents take one extra step, and it is a quick one.
Use Split PDF to separate the document into groups that share a border, crop each group with its own numbers, then put them back together with Merge PDF. For the frequent case of one landscape page in a portrait document, Rotate PDF often solves the problem outright, since the page usually needs turning rather than trimming.
It stays in the file, outside the visible window — which is what makes cropping reversible and keeps the page perfectly sharp. Crop again with smaller numbers to bring material back. When content needs to be genuinely removed, Redact PDF deletes the underlying text and image data instead of hiding it.
Points are the unit stored inside the PDF itself, so what you type is what the file records — no rounding in between. The conversions are easy: 72 points to the inch, about 28 to the centimetre. A4 is 595 × 842 points and Letter is 612 × 792.
Yes, in two steps. Split PDF pulls out the pages that need their own treatment, you crop each set with its own numbers, and Merge PDF reassembles them in order. For a single odd page, check whether Rotate PDF fixes it first — sideways pages are more common than mis-sized ones.
Only marginally, since cropping changes the display window rather than the content. Compress PDF is the tool for file size: it recompresses embedded photos while leaving text and line art untouched, with a Scanned Document mode that typically cuts scans by around 10×.
The preview renders the first page because that is the reference nearly everyone crops against, and the same trim is then applied throughout. Scanned documents are consistent enough that this works out; for a document with genuinely varied pages, split it into consistent groups first.
Yes. CropBox is part of the PDF specification and every mainstream reader, browser viewer and printer honours it — Acrobat, Preview, Chrome, Edge, and the readers built into phones. It is the same mechanism print shops use.
No. Plenty of PDFs — particularly ones exported from design software — have a MediaBox with a non-zero origin such as [-12 -12 600 800]. The trim is measured from each page's own edges rather than assuming a zero origin, so those files crop correctly.
No. Cropping happens in JavaScript inside this tab, using pdf-lib and PDF.js loaded once by your browser. Turn off your network connection before you start and the tool still works — worth trying if the document is confidential.
Privacy: Cropping runs locally with pdf-lib — only MediaBox values change, never the page streams. Your PDF is not uploaded.