Crop PDF

Drag it, do not calculate it

The page renders as it really is, with a crop box you can move and resize from eight points. That matters because cropping is a visual judgement — you are looking at where the text block actually starts, not working out how many millimetres of margin to remove.

Most free croppers ask for numeric margins, which means estimating, applying, downloading, looking, and going back to change the numbers. Here the box shows you the result before you commit, with a readout of the crop dimensions.

Five presets set a fixed shape when you need one: A4 Portrait, A4 Landscape, Letter, Square and 16:9. Square is for a page heading into a social post; 16:9 is for reframing a document to slide proportions.

What cropping actually does to a PDF — and what it does not

This is the part no other page on this subject explains, and it matters in both directions.

Cropping a PDF does not cut anything out of the file. It sets a crop box: a rectangle telling readers and printers which part of the page to display. The rest of the page is still there, outside the visible area.

The good news first. Because nothing is re-rendered, the crop is lossless — text stays selectable text, images keep their full resolution, nothing is re-compressed, and the file does not degrade. It is also reversible: if you crop too tightly, resetting the crop box in a PDF editor brings the full page back. You are not destroying your document.

And the warning, which is the important half. Never use cropping to remove confidential material. If you crop away a name, a signature, a salary figure or a margin note, that content is still inside the file and anyone who receives it can recover it by resetting the crop box — no special skill required. Cropping changes what is shown; it does not remove what is there.

If content genuinely has to be gone, the reliable answers are to delete the whole pages that carry it, or to go back to the original document, remove it at the source, and export a fresh PDF. Those are the two approaches that leave nothing behind.

What cropping is actually good for

Scans with enormous margins. The single best use. A scanned book page or academic paper often wastes 30–40% of its area on white space, which on a tablet or e-reader means the text renders tiny. Crop the margins and the same text fills the screen — the most effective readability fix there is for a scanned PDF, and it costs no quality at all.

Removing a header or footer from every page. A watermark strip, a confidentiality banner, a page-number bar, a fax header across the top of a scan. Set the crop once and apply to all pages.

Reframing for a different medium. Pulling a portrait page into 16:9 for a slide, or squaring off a page for a social post.

Which pages

All pages is the default and correct when the document has a consistent layout, which most do. First page only suits a cover sheet that differs from the rest. A custom range like 1,3,5-8 is for a mixed document — a report where the landscape appendix needs different treatment from the portrait body.

One thing to watch with all-pages cropping: if your document mixes portrait and landscape pages, one crop box cannot suit both, since the box is applied proportionally. Crop them in separate passes using custom ranges.

Related tools

Compress PDF reduces the file size afterwards, which is worth doing since cropping alone does not make the file smaller — the hidden content is still in there. Merge PDF combines the cropped document with others.