How to crop the pages of a PDF
Crop PDF reduces the visible area of your pages to the region you mark. It is the quick way to get rid of huge white margins, the black borders of a scan, the header of an email printed to PDF, or to keep only part of a drawing or slide.
Cropping is especially useful for reading on a phone or e-reader, where every spare millimetre of margin makes the text smaller.
Step by step
- Upload your PDF.
- In the preview, choose to mark the area to keep and draw a rectangle on the page.
- Under apply to pages, list the pages to crop, or leave it empty to apply the same crop, proportionally, to every page.
- Process, check the result and download it.
Cropping is not deleting
Each PDF page has a crop box: the part that readers display and print. This tool adjusts that box, but whatever falls outside it is still inside the file. Layout software works the same way, which is why cropping does not lose quality or turn text into an image.
The important consequence: if you crop to hide an account number, a name or a signature, that information is still in the PDF and could be recovered. To remove data permanently, use Redact PDF.
Tips for a clean crop
If every page has the same layout, mark the area once and leave the pages field empty: the same proportion is used throughout. If odd and even pages have different margins, as in many scanned books, process one set of pages and then the other.
Leave a little breathing room around the text; a crop that is too tight can clip letters or page numbers when printed. Up to 50 pages per PDF and 50 MB per job.
Frequently asked questions
- Does cropping delete the content outside the area?
- No. It only changes the visible area; the content stays in the file. To truly remove it, use Redact PDF.
- Can I crop all pages the same way?
- Yes. Mark the area once and leave the pages field empty; the same proportion is applied to all pages.
- Does cropping a PDF reduce quality?
- No. Nothing is recompressed or rasterised, and the text stays selectable.
- Can it remove white margins?
- Yes, that is one of its most common uses, especially for reading PDFs on a phone or e-reader.
- Can I crop just one page?
- Yes, type its number in the pages field.