Crop PDF

How to use Crop PDF

1. 1

   Upload the PDF you want to crop.

2. 2

   Enter the margin to trim from the top, bottom, left and right in millimeters.

3. 3

   Click Crop to apply the trim to every page.

4. 4

   Download the cropped PDF.

What cropping a PDF actually does

To crop a PDF is to shrink the visible area of every page by a fixed margin on each side. Scans come out with wide white borders that waste screen space on a tablet; a slide deck exported with a black frame; a document set up for letterhead with a huge top margin you no longer need; a page whose small print sits in a corner you want centred and larger on screen. In each case the fix is trimming the edges, not editing the content.

Enter how many millimetres to remove from the top, right, bottom and left, watch the dashed frame on the preview move to show what will be kept, and click Crop. The same margins are applied to every page, which is exactly right for a scan whose borders are consistent, and a poor fit for a document where every page needs a different crop — for that, split it first and crop the parts separately.

How the file changes, and what stays

The tool adjusts the page boxes — the crop box and the media box that tell a viewer how big the page is and which part to display. Nothing on the page is re-rendered: text remains selectable and searchable, images keep their original compression and vector graphics stay sharp. The file size barely changes, because the content is the same; only the frame around it is smaller.

That also means the crop is a viewing instruction, not a deletion. The drawing operations for the trimmed area can still exist in the file, and some tools can enlarge the boxes back to reveal them. Cropping is the right way to tidy margins and the wrong way to remove a name, a figure or a signature. For that, use the Redact PDF tool, which removes the content itself.

• Lossless — the page content is untouched, only the page frame shrinks.
• Applied uniformly to all pages, up to 200 mm per side.
• Never a substitute for redaction when hiding data.

Choosing the right margins

Start small. Ten millimetres on every side removes the usual scanner border without touching the content; twenty or twenty-five tames a generously formatted document. The preview is scaled against an A4 page, so if the file is Letter or a custom size the dashed frame is a good guide rather than a millimetre-exact one — check the first page of the result before trusting a large crop on a long document.

If the margins you enter would leave almost nothing — less than about 13 mm in either direction — the tool refuses rather than producing an unreadable sliver. Remember that page numbers and footers usually sit inside the bottom margin, and running headers inside the top one; if you want to keep them, crop the sides more aggressively than the top and bottom.

Cropping without uploading

Every step runs inside your browser, using the WebAssembly and Canvas APIs your device already ships with. No file is uploaded, no copy is kept, and nothing sits in a queue on a server waiting to be deleted — which is also why the tool keeps working with the network disconnected.

Cropping is a small edit, and it should not require handing a full document to a server. Here the preview is rendered on your device, the page boxes are rewritten in your browser, and the cropped PDF is downloaded from memory — free, without an account and without a watermark.

Frequently Asked Questions

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