PDF-016
Crop PDF
Cropping narrows the visible area of each page. It is how you get rid of the thick white borders on a scan, or cut away the shadow along the spine of a photographed book.
- Free
- No signup
- Private · runs locally
How to crop pdf
- Upload the PDF with the margins you want to trim.
- Set how much to cut from each side.
- Check the preview and download the cropped file.
Cropping hides content, it does not delete it
A PDF crop changes the box that defines the visible region. The content outside that box is still in the file, and anyone can reveal it by cropping back out or by extracting the text.
This matters if you were cropping to hide something. A name in a letterhead or a figure in a margin remains extractable, so never treat a crop as redaction.
To genuinely remove content, the pages have to be rasterised - Compress PDF does that as a side effect, because it converts pages to images.
Why cropping helps on small screens
An A4 page on a phone or an e-reader is mostly margin, and the reader shrinks the text to fit whitespace nobody needs to see.
Trimming the borders lets the same screen devote its pixels to the words, which is the single biggest readability gain for reading papers on a tablet.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The file is opened and rewritten by your browser, so it never leaves your device. That matters for contracts, invoices and anything with personal data in it.
Can I crop different amounts on different pages?
The crop applies to the whole document. For mixed layouts, split the file, crop each part separately, then merge.
Does cropping make the file smaller?
Barely. The hidden content is still stored. Use Compress PDF if size is the goal.