What cropping a PDF means
Cropping shrinks the visible area of each page. The corners of the page move inward, the white margins disappear, and the document reads tighter and looks bigger on screen. The hidden content is not deleted, it is just no longer shown by readers and printers. This is the CropBox approach used by Adobe Acrobat, ilovepdf, and every serious PDF editor.
This tool runs fully in your browser. Drop a PDF, drag a rectangle on the first-page preview to select what to keep, then apply the same crop to every page or only specific ones. The original file never leaves your device.
How to use it
- Drop a PDF file onto the upload area or click to pick one from disk.
- Wait while the first page renders as a large preview.
- Drag a rectangle on the preview to mark the area you want to keep. Anything outside the rectangle becomes a hidden margin.
- Need precision? Use the margin sliders (top, right, bottom, left) to trim by a fixed number of millimeters from each edge.
- Pick Apply to all pages for a uniform crop, or stay on the first page only if the rest of the document already looks fine.
- The status line shows the resulting page size in millimeters, so you know in advance how the output will look on paper.
- Press Apply and download to save the cropped PDF.
- Want to start fresh? Reset crop clears the selection without re-uploading.
When this is useful
Common reasons to crop pages in a PDF:
- Removing oversized scanner margins: scans often have wide white borders. Crop them and the text fills the screen on mobile devices.
- Cutting headers and footers: page numbers, source links, or footer logos that you do not want in the final version are easy to crop out.
- Preparing for e-reader displays: Kindle and other small screens benefit from tighter margins so the text is bigger without zooming.
- Removing watermarks at the edge of the page: some templates put logos or stamps in the margin. Crop the edge to make them disappear.
- Trimming book scans: book scanners often capture the binding shadow on one side. Cropping the inner margin cleans the layout.
- Focusing on a specific area for printing: print only the receipt section of a tax form or a paragraph of a contract by cropping around it.
- Standardizing pages from different sources: a merged PDF often has different page sizes. A uniform crop pulls them visually into the same frame.
Companion tools: PDF text extractor, PDF to images converter, image cropper.
Questions and answers
No. The whole tool runs in your browser with pdf.js for previews and pdf-lib for the output. The file is loaded into memory, cropped, and downloaded back to you.