How to Crop a PDF
Scans arrive with slack around the edges. A wide white border, a grey shadow where the scanner lid did not close, the edge of the sheet underneath, sometimes a strip of the facing page. On screen it reads as a minor untidiness; printed, or pasted into a report next to properly trimmed pages, it is the first thing anyone notices.
Cropping changes the page boundaries inside the document, so the trimmed result travels with the file everywhere — in a viewer, in print, in a merged report. This guide covers setting the frame, why it applies to the whole document at once, and what to do when the pages of one file need different treatment.
Ready to do it now? Open Crop PDF and get your file in a few seconds.
Open the toolWhen you need to crop a PDF
- Removing the white margins of a scan so the content fills the page instead of floating in the middle of it.
- Cutting off a scanner shadow, a dark strip along the spine, or the edge of the sheet lying underneath.
- Trimming a page down to one region — a table, a drawing, a certificate — before pasting it into another document.
- Preparing pages for print or for a tablet, where wide margins waste paper and screen alike.
How to crop a PDF step by step
Open the Crop PDF tool
Go to the Crop PDF page. Cropping runs on your own device: nothing is installed, nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.
Add the document
Drag the PDF onto the upload area or pick it from the dialog, and wait for the first page to appear with a frame around it.
Set the area you want to keep
Drag the corners of the frame inwards until only the content you need is inside it. The whole frame can be moved by its middle, which is easier than adjusting four corners when a scan sits off-centre.
Check it against the busiest page
The frame applies to every page, so think of the page with the widest content — a table that runs close to the edge, a header, a page number — and leave it room. Reset frame starts over if you have cropped too tightly.
Crop and download
Press “Crop and download”. The new file is saved to your device; the original stays untouched on disk.
Common problems and how to fix them
Content got cut off on some pages
The frame was set on a page with narrow content and applied to a wider one. Crop the original again with more room, judging by the busiest page rather than the first one.
The file has pages of different sizes
That is handled: the area is stored as a share of the page, not in millimetres, so A4 and landscape pages in one file are trimmed proportionally rather than all to the same rectangle.
Different pages need different crops
One pass sets one area. Split the document with Split PDF, crop each part with its own frame, then put them back together with Merge PDF.
The crop does not show in another program
Some viewers cache the file. Reopen it, or check that you opened the downloaded copy and not the original, which is left exactly as it was.
Cropping versus zooming in a viewer
A viewer can hide margins by zooming or by its own crop setting, but that changes only what you see. Send the file on and the recipient sees the full page again, and printing brings the margins back.
Cropping here edits the page boundaries inside the document, so the result is the same everywhere — on another computer, on a phone, in print, inside a merged report. The trade-off is that it is final in the downloaded file, which is why the original is worth keeping.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is cropping a PDF free?
Yes — free, with no sign-up, no watermark and no limit on how many files you crop.
Does the crop apply to every page?
Yes. One frame is applied to the whole document, and because the area is measured as a share of the page, files with mixed page sizes come out right.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. The cropping runs in your browser on your own device, and the document is never sent anywhere.
Does the quality drop?
No. Only the page boundaries change — nothing is re-encoded, so text stays text and images keep their original quality.
Can the crop be undone?
Not in the downloaded file, so keep the original. Before downloading, Reset frame puts the area back and you can start again.
Is the cut-off content really gone?
It is hidden, not erased: cropping moves the page boundaries, and the data outside them stays inside the file. For genuinely sensitive material, remove the content itself rather than cropping it out of sight.
Ready to do it now? Open Crop PDF and get your file in a few seconds.
Open the tool