Crop PDF

Trim PDF pages.

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Select PDF File

Or drag and drop here

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Click and drag to select the area you want to keep. Resize if needed.

Pages:

All pagesCurrent page

Crop PDF pages to the area you actually want

Trim the visible margins of a PDF, on every page or page by page. Runs entirely in your browser, so the document is never uploaded.

Cropping a PDF is usually about reclaiming the page. A scan comes out with two centimetres of grey around the edge, a slide deck exported with printer marks, an A4 report that would read far better on a tablet if the enormous margins were gone. In each case the content is fine; the frame around it is not.

This tool lets you set a crop region and apply it to every page at once, or to individual pages where the problem varies — a scan where only the first sheet went through the feeder crooked, for instance.

Before you use it, there is one thing you genuinely need to know, and we have put it in the limitations section in plain terms: cropping changes what a reader displays, not what the file contains. If you are cropping to hide something, this is not the tool for that. We would rather tell you that up front than have you find out later.

Nothing is uploaded

The document is loaded and rewritten inside the browser tab. No server sees the pages you are trimming.

Lossless on the content

Text stays vector text and images keep their resolution. Only the page boundary changes, so nothing is re-rendered or degraded.

All pages or one at a time

Apply a single crop across the whole document, or set a different region for individual pages when the source is inconsistent.

How to crop a PDF

Open the PDF and preview its pages.

Drag to set the region you want to keep.

Apply it to every page or adjust individual ones.

Download the cropped document.

Your document stays in the browser

Pages are loaded, measured and rewritten on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded — though note that cropping hides content rather than deleting it, so a cropped file still contains everything it started with.

When people reach for this

Cleaning up a scan

A flatbed or feeder adds a border of scanner lid, page edge and shadow. Cropping it away makes the document look deliberate rather than photographed, and helps OCR by removing noise at the margins.

Making a document readable on a tablet or e-reader

Generous print margins waste most of a small screen. Trimming them can be the difference between a paper you can actually read on a device and one you constantly pinch and pan.

Removing printer marks from an exported file

Design and prepress exports often carry crop marks, colour bars and slug information. Cropping to the trim size gives you the document as it was meant to be seen.

Extracting a figure or a region for reuse

You want the chart on page 12 without the surrounding text. Cropping to it, then exporting to an image, is quicker than screenshotting and gives you a cleaner result.

What actually happens to your file

The PDF is loaded in your browser with pdf-lib, and the region you dragged is converted from a percentage of the page into PDF points. That conversion has to flip the vertical axis, because the PDF coordinate system has its origin at the bottom-left of the page while the preview you dragged on has its origin at the top-left.

For each page you are cropping, the tool then calls setCropBox with those coordinates. A PDF page carries several boxes: the MediaBox describes the full sheet, and the CropBox describes the region a reader should actually display. Setting the CropBox tells every viewer to show only your region.

This is why the operation is lossless and instantaneous even on a long document. Nothing is re-rendered, no image is re-encoded and no text is touched. One rectangle in the page dictionary changes.

It is also, precisely, why the content outside the crop is still in the file. The MediaBox is unchanged and the drawing instructions are unchanged; the reader has simply been told to look at a smaller window.

What cropping does not do

It does not delete anything. The text and images outside your crop region remain in the file. A reader that ignores the CropBox, a tool that resets it, or a plain text extraction will bring the hidden content straight back.
So it is not redaction. Do not crop to remove confidential information — names, figures, signatures — from a document you are sending out. If someone must not see something, it has to be removed from the page content, not framed out of view.
Text can be cut mid-line. Cropping is geometric, not semantic; it has no idea where a sentence or a column begins.
The file does not get smaller. Since the content is still there, the byte size is essentially unchanged. Cropping is not a compression strategy.
Some viewers and printers apply the MediaBox rather than the CropBox, particularly in print workflows, so a cropped page may print with its original margins.

Compared with an online cropper

	This tool	Typical cloud tool
Where your file goes	Nowhere. It stays in the browser tab.	Uploaded to a server you do not control.
Content outside the crop	Still in the file — we say so plainly.	Also still there; rarely disclosed.
Quality	Lossless — only the CropBox changes.	Some rasterise pages, which degrades them.
Per-page crops	Yes.	Often one region for the whole document.
Works offline	Yes, once the page has loaded.	No.
Watermarks	None.	Frequently added on free tiers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does cropping delete the content outside the region?expand_more

No, and this is the most important thing to understand about it. Cropping sets the CropBox, which tells readers what area to display. The original page content is still in the file and can be recovered by resetting that box or by extracting the text.

Can I use cropping to redact a document?expand_more

No. Anything you crop out is still present and readable to anyone who looks past the display window. To remove sensitive content you have to eliminate it from the page itself, not frame it out.

Will cropping make my file smaller?expand_more

Essentially no. The content outside the crop is still stored, so the byte size barely changes. If size is the goal, use the compress tool.

Does it reduce quality?expand_more

Not at all. Nothing is re-rendered or re-encoded — a single rectangle in the page dictionary changes. Text stays selectable and images keep their full resolution.

Can I crop each page differently?expand_more

Yes. You can apply one region to the whole document, or set a different region on individual pages, which is what you usually need for a scan where some sheets went through crooked.

My cropped PDF still prints with the old margins.expand_more

Some printers and print pipelines honour the MediaBox rather than the CropBox. If you need the crop to survive printing, exporting the cropped pages to images and rebuilding a PDF from them will force it, at the cost of the text layer.

Can I undo a crop?expand_more

Not within this tool, but the underlying content was never removed, so the original is recoverable in software that lets you reset the CropBox. Keeping a copy of the original file is still the sensible habit.

Tools that pair with this one

Compress PDFCropping does not shrink the file; this actually does.PDF to imageExporting the cropped page to an image is the way to make a crop permanent.Rotate PDFStraighten sideways scans before deciding where the crop should sit.OCR PDFCropping scanner noise off the margins first tends to improve recognition.