Crop PDF Pages and Trim the Margins
or drop files here
Pull the frame in over page 1 to cut away blank borders, crop marks, or everything except the part you need. The same trim goes onto every page you pick, and the PDF never leaves your device.
Frame it, trim it, save it.
Open the PDF
Drop the file in and page 1 opens large, with a violet frame lying along its edges. Locked files ask for their password first.
Pull the frame in
Drag any edge or corner, press Fit to content to hug the printed area, or type each margin in millimetres. Then pick the pages it applies to.
Save the trimmed copy
Choose a standard or permanent crop, click Crop PDF, then save the new file. Your original stays exactly as it was.
When the edges of a page get in the way.
Page borders are chosen for paper, binding or a print press, rarely for the screen you read on. These are the jobs people most often crop for.
Scanned book pages
A flatbed captures the whole glass, so a paperback page arrives inside a wide grey or white border. Trimming it lets the text fill a tablet screen instead of a third of it.
Print files with bleed and marks
Designers export proofs with 3 mm of bleed, trim marks and colour bars around the artwork. Crop to the trim line to share a clean version that looks like the finished piece.
One receipt out of a scan
A phone scan of a receipt often includes the desk around it. Frame just the slip for an expense claim, using Choose pages when it sits inside a longer file.
Reading on small screens
Journal articles and theses often keep 25 mm margins for binding. Taking 15 mm off each side makes fit-to-width zoom on an e-reader or phone noticeably larger.
Browser print headers
Printing a web page to PDF can stamp the date, page title and address along the top and bottom. A thin crop removes those bands from every page at once.
A figure for a slide or report
Cut a chart or diagram down to just the drawing, then place that page in a slide deck or document. Most apps that import a PDF page use its cropped area, and the lines stay crisp.
CropBox vs MediaBox: what a crop really changes.
Every PDF page stores a few rectangles. The MediaBox is the sheet the page was created on. The CropBox is the part that viewers show and print, and when a file has none it simply matches the MediaBox. Print files may also carry a TrimBox (the finished size after cutting) and a BleedBox (artwork that runs past it).
A standard crop moves only the CropBox inwards. Nothing drawn on the page is touched, the original sheet size is still recorded, and any editor that lets you set page boxes can widen the crop again later. The flip side is that the trimmed strip is hidden rather than removed, so text inside it may still turn up when someone searches the file or copies all of its text.
A permanent crop moves the MediaBox to the same rectangle and removes the TrimBox, BleedBox and ArtBox, so the trimmed size becomes the real page size. Print dialogs, imposition software and apps that only read the MediaBox all agree on it. The drawing instructions for the trimmed strip are still inside the page, though, sitting outside the sheet where nothing renders them.
If what you cut away must really be gone, such as an account number, a signature or someone else's receipt on the same scan, crop first and then run Flatten PDF with the Image-only option. It redraws only the visible area as pictures, so nothing outside the crop survives. Text is no longer selectable afterwards, which OCR PDF can restore.
| Standard | Permanent | |
|---|---|---|
| What viewers display | Trimmed area | Trimmed area |
| Original sheet size recorded | Yes | No |
| Size seen by tools that read the MediaBox | Original | Trimmed |
| Easy to undo in an editor | Yes | Only if you know the old size |
| Trimmed content still in the file | Yes | Yes |
| TrimBox and BleedBox | Left as they were | Removed |
Questions answered.
Does cropping a PDF delete the part I cut off?
What does "Make the new size permanent" do?
Can I crop only some pages, or crop pages differently?
Why does the preview show page 1 only?
How do I trim the white border from a scan?
Will a cropped PDF be smaller?
What about pages that are stored sideways?
How precise can the crop be?
Is my PDF uploaded to crop it?
More tools you might need.
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