About crop PDF
Cropping a PDF works through the crop box, a second rectangle alongside the media box that tells a reader which part of the page to display and print. Setting a smaller crop box hides everything outside it, which is why cropping is fast and completely lossless — no content is re-rendered and nothing is thrown away. The crucial implication is that the hidden material still exists in the page's content stream. Text trimmed off the edge remains extractable by copy-paste and by text-extraction tools, and some readers offer a way to restore the full view. Cropping is therefore a presentation change, never a redaction. Used for what it is good at, it is excellent: reclaiming the grey borders a flatbed scanner adds, removing generous print margins so a document is readable on a phone, or trimming crop marks from a press-ready file. Measurements are in points, with 72 points to the inch.
How to crop PDF
- 01
Load the PDF
Drop in the document with unwanted margins or scanner borders.
- 02
Choose a preset or set edges
Start from a light or aggressive trim, or enter separate values for top, right, bottom and left.
- 03
Limit the pages if needed
Leave the page field empty to crop everything, or name only the pages with the problem.
- 04
Crop and check
Press the action button, then confirm no content was clipped before you keep the result.
What this tool does
- Independent control of all four edges, in points
- Presets for a quick light or aggressive trim
- Per-page scope, so only the scanned pages need cropping
- Lossless — the crop box changes, page content is never re-rendered
- Reversible in principle, since the underlying page is intact
Limitations worth knowing
Every PDF tool has constraints. Stating them plainly is more useful than discovering them halfway through your work.
- Cropping hides content, it does not delete it. Trimmed text is still extractable and is not a substitute for redaction.
- A uniform trim is applied to every selected page, so pages with differing scan borders may need separate runs.
- File size does not shrink, because the hidden content is still stored.
- A few tools and printers ignore the crop box and use the media box, showing the full page again.
How your file is handled
This tool runs entirely inside this browser tab. When you choose a file, your browser reads it from your own disk and hands the bytes to JavaScript running on this page — no network request carries your document anywhere. You can confirm that yourself: open your browser’s developer tools, switch to the Network panel, and run the tool. You will see no upload.
Nothing is stored after the fact. Closing or reloading this tab discards the file, the result and everything derived from them, because none of it ever left your machine. Read how local processing works.
Questions about crop PDF
Is cropping a safe way to hide confidential text?
No. The crop box only limits what is displayed; the text remains in the content stream and can be recovered by copy-paste or extraction tools. Use a redaction tool for confidential material.
Does cropping reduce the file size?
No. Nothing is removed from the document — the hidden content is still stored. Compress PDF is what reduces bytes.
Can I undo a crop?
Because the original page content is intact, restoring the full view is possible in tools that let you edit the crop box. Keeping your uncropped original is still the simplest safeguard.
Why does my cropped PDF still show the margins in one program?
Some viewers and print paths honour the media box rather than the crop box. Most modern readers respect the crop box, but this is why cropping should not be relied on to conceal anything.
Tools that pair with this one
- PDF Page Size ChangerRebuild your document on a different paper size.
- Resize PDF PagesScale your pages up or down without re-rendering the content.
- Compress PDFMake a PDF smaller by re-encoding its images and cleaning up its internals.
- Rotate PDFTurn sideways or upside-down pages the right way up, permanently.
- PDF to JPGRender each page of a PDF as a JPG image, at the resolution you pick.
- Organize PDFPut the pages of your document in the order you actually want.
Read more about this
- How to merge PDF filesJoining documents copies pages into a new PDF rather than re-rendering them. This guide covers the actual order controls and the document-level features that a merge cannot promise to preserve.5 min guide
- How to split a PDF into separate filesSplitting turns one document into many. This guide explains the three split methods, how to pick between them, and what each output does and does not inherit.5 min guide
- How to delete pages from a PDFDeleting pages rebuilds the document from the pages you kept. Lossless for the survivors, and not the size fix people expect it to be.4 min guide