PDF Crop
Trim the margins off a PDF by dragging on the page or typing exact measurements, on one page or every page.
Drop a PDF here
Rendered and written in this page. Nothing is uploaded.
Which page the preview shows.
Like 1-4,9. Ignored unless a range is chosen.
Leave off for a reversible crop. Turn on when the file goes to a print shop or another tool.
A crop hides, it does not delete
Cropped-away content stays in the file and can be brought back by resetting the box. The file does not get smaller. Neither is a bug — it is what the PDF crop box is.
Everything here runs on your device. Nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.
Set the visible area of a PDF by dragging over a preview of the page or by typing exact margins for each edge. The crop applies to one page, a range you type, or the whole document, and the file is read and written in this page rather than uploaded anywhere.
How to use it
- Drop or choose a PDF. Page one appears with the whole area selected.
- Drag a rectangle over what you want to keep, or type margins.
- Switch between millimetres, inches and points whenever you like.
- Choose all pages or a range, then press Crop and download.
What a crop actually does
Every PDF page carries two rectangles. The media box is the sheet — the physical page the document claims to be printed on. The crop box is the window a reader is asked to show, and by default it is the whole sheet.
Cropping sets the crop box. Nothing is deleted, nothing is redrawn, and the text outside the new box is still in the file. That is a feature more often than a flaw: the crop is reversible, the text layer stays complete for search and copying, and nothing is re-rendered so quality is untouched. It is also why the file does not get smaller, and why a crop is not a way to hide anything from someone determined.
The media box option exists for the case where the crop needs to be more than a display instruction. Some printing and imposition software reads the media box and ignores the crop box completely, which is how a carefully cropped file comes back from a print shop with its margins restored. Tick the box and both rectangles change.
Rotation, which is where most tools go wrong
A page’s rotation is stored as a flag, separate from its coordinates. A scanner producing landscape output usually writes a portrait page with a 90 degree rotation rather than a landscape page, so the edge you see along the top of the screen is the left edge in the file’s own coordinates.
Take the margins off without accounting for that and the crop lands on the wrong side of the page. Margins here are collected in the orientation you are looking at and converted before they are written, and the preview shows the page as a reader will. What you see at the top is what gets trimmed off the top.
Mixed page sizes
A single set of margins across a document of varying page sizes is a normal request, and it is normal for it to be too much for one small page in the middle. Rather than write a collapsed box that some readers refuse to open, those pages are skipped and listed by number in the summary, so you know exactly which ones need a second pass.
For a scanned book with opposite binding margins on facing pages, crop the odd pages, download, and crop the even pages of the result. Crops compound — the second is measured from the first, not from the original sheet.
Which tool for which job
| You want | Use |
|---|---|
| To trim white margins | This tool |
| To keep half a page | This tool, half presets |
| A smaller file | Compress PDF |
| To turn pages the right way up | PDF Rotate Pages |
Questions
Does cropping make the file smaller?
No, and any tool that says otherwise is describing something else. Cropping sets the CropBox, which is the rectangle a reader is asked to display; the page content stays exactly where it was, including the parts now outside the box. The file usually grows by a few hundred bytes. If your goal is a smaller file, compression is the tool for that. If your goal is to make cropped-away content genuinely unrecoverable, no crop of any kind will do it — the content has to be removed or the page rasterised.
What is the difference between the crop box and the media box?
The media box is the physical sheet the page describes, and the crop box is the window onto it. Readers display and print the crop box, so changing it alone is enough for the result to look and print cropped, and the original page can be recovered by resetting the box. Ticking the media box option changes the sheet itself, which is what you want when the file goes on to another tool — some imposition and printing software reads only the media box and would otherwise ignore your crop entirely.
Why does my rotated page crop the wrong edge in other tools?
Because a page carries a rotation flag separately from its coordinates. A page with a 90 degree rotation is stored one way up and displayed another, so the edge you see at the top is the left edge of the coordinate space, and a tool that ignores the flag takes the margin off somewhere unexpected. This tool collects margins in the orientation you are looking at and converts them before writing, so the top of what you see is the top of what gets trimmed.
Can I crop different pages by different amounts?
One crop at a time, applied to a page range you choose, and you can run the tool again on the result with different numbers. That covers the common case of a scanned book where the left-hand and right-hand pages need opposite binding margins — crop the odd pages, download, then crop the even pages of that file. Pages too small for the margins you set are skipped and named in the summary rather than silently collapsed.
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