Enter how much to trim from the top, bottom, left and right of each page, in millimetres, and download the PDF with the margins cut back. Use it to remove the wide white borders some documents are exported with, the grey edges a scanner leaves round a page, or printer crop marks around a design proof.
Each side is set separately, so you can trim a deep header area without touching the sides, or shave a scanner border off one edge only. You can crop every page or only the pages you list, which helps with documents where a few pages were scanned differently from the rest.
Margins are measured on the page as you see it. On a page stored sideways and rotated for display, as many scanners save landscape pages, “top” still means the top of what is on screen.
How to crop PDF
- Add your PDF. Drop it on the box above or tap to choose it. One file at a time, up to 100 MB.
- Set the margins to trim. Enter millimetres for each side. 10 mm is about the width of a fingertip; 25 mm is an inch.
- Choose the pages. Leave the pages box empty to crop every page, or enter ranges such as 1, 4-6 to crop only those.
- Crop and download. Check the first page or two of the result. If too much went, go back and use smaller numbers.
Working out how much to trim
An A4 page is 210 millimetres wide and 297 tall; US Letter is about 216 by 279. Most documents exported from a word processor carry margins of 20 to 25 millimetres, so trimming 15 from each side tightens the page without cutting into the text.
For a scan, open it in your PDF reader and look at how wide the dark or grey border is compared to the page. If the border looks about a twentieth of the page width, that is roughly 10 millimetres on A4. Start small: it is easy to run the tool again and trim a little more, and impossible to bring back something you cropped from your only copy.
There is a safety limit. If the numbers you enter would leave less than about 13 millimetres of a page in either direction, the crop is refused rather than producing an empty sliver.
Why crop a PDF
Reading on a phone or e-reader. A PDF is a fixed page, so wide margins mean smaller text on a small screen. Trimming them lets the content fill the display, which often makes the difference between readable and squinting.
Cleaning up scans. Flatbed scanners capture the whole glass, leaving dark edges and shadows round the actual page. Cropping those off makes the document look like the original and prints without a black frame.
Preparing an image or figure. To use a chart or diagram from a PDF somewhere else, crop down to it first, then convert the page with PDF to JPG. You get the figure without the surrounding page.
What cropping does to the file
Cropping sets the area of each page that PDF readers show and printers print. Everything outside that area is hidden, but it is not deleted. The full page is still inside the file, and anyone who resets the crop in a PDF editor will see it again.
For that reason, do not crop to hide information. If a page contains something that must not be shared, cropping it out of view does not remove it. Delete the whole page with Remove Pages, or use redaction, which removes the content itself.
The same fact has an upside: nothing is re-rendered. Text stays sharp and selectable, images keep their full quality, and the file size barely changes.
Questions people actually ask
How do I remove white margins from a PDF?
Enter the same amount for all four sides, for example 15 millimetres, and crop. For a typical document exported from Word or Google Docs with 25 millimetre margins, 15 trims most of the white space while leaving a small border so the text does not touch the edge of the screen or paper.
Can I crop only one page?
Yes. Type that page number into the pages box, for example 3, and only that page is cropped. Separate several pages with commas, such as 1, 5-7. Pages you do not list keep their original size, so a document can mix cropped and uncropped pages.
Does cropping a PDF delete the content outside the crop?
No. It changes which part of each page is shown and printed, but the rest of the page is still stored in the file and can be revealed again with a PDF editor. To get rid of content for good, remove the page entirely or use a redaction tool instead.
Why did my landscape page crop on the wrong side?
It should not here: margins are applied to the page as it appears on screen, so top is always the top you see, even when the page is stored sideways and rotated for display. If a crop still looks wrong, check whether the page is upside down, and fix it with Rotate PDF first.
Will cropping reduce the quality or size of my PDF?
Quality stays exactly the same, because nothing is redrawn. The text remains selectable and images keep their resolution. The file size stays about the same too, since the trimmed parts are hidden rather than removed. To make the file smaller, compress it instead.