Crop PDF
Crop PDF lets you drag a crop box over a live page preview and trims every page to that area, or just the page you are looking at. Cropping changes the visible page box; the content outside it is hidden rather than deleted, which is how the PDF format handles cropping.
1 Add your file
Enter the open password to use it here. It is checked in your browser and never sent anywhere.
2 Choose your options
How to crop PDF
Add your PDF
The page is rendered at a workable size with a crop box over it.
Set the crop area
Drag the box and its corners, type exact margins, or press Trim white space to find the content automatically.
Download the cropped PDF
Applied to one page or to the whole document, as you choose.
Cropping hides content rather than deleting it
Every PDF page has a media box, which is its full extent, and a crop box, which is the region a viewer displays. Cropping sets the crop box. The content outside it is still in the file — it is simply not shown.
That design makes cropping instant and completely lossless, and it has one important consequence: cropping is not a way to remove something. Text outside the crop box remains in the content stream and can be extracted or restored by widening the box again.
A worked example
A 300-page book scan has 4 cm of grey margin on every page. Cropping to the text block makes it far more comfortable to read on a tablet and takes a moment, because nothing is re-rendered. If the margins contain a name or a stamp that must not travel with the file, cropping is the wrong tool — Redact PDF removes content; cropping only hides it.
Limitations worth knowing
- Cropped content is hidden, not removed. It remains extractable and can be restored by resetting the crop box.
- For genuinely removing content, use Redact PDF.
- Some viewers and printers ignore the crop box and show the full media box, so a cropped file may print with its margins back.
- A single crop applied to pages of different sizes will not suit all of them.
- Cropping too tightly risks clipping descenders or marginal notes — leave a small allowance.
Related tools
Crop PDF — frequently asked questions
No, and this is worth understanding. Cropping sets the page's visible box; the content outside it is hidden rather than removed, and specialist software can restore it. If the material outside must genuinely be destroyed, use Redact PDF.
It renders the page and finds the outermost non-white pixels, then sets the crop box just outside them with a small margin. It handles the common case of a scan with wide empty borders in one click.
One crop at a time, yes — choose Just this page, download, and repeat. A single box applied to differently sized pages would produce inconsistent results, so the tool does not pretend to do it in one pass.
Because nothing was thrown away — only the visible box changed. Run the result through Compress PDF if size is what you are after.
Yes. The CropBox is what every viewer and printer uses to decide what to show, so the cropped page is what comes out.