Crop PDF Pages

When do you need to crop a PDF?

When white margins are so wide that the text looks tiny on a phone screen, when a scanner leaves a grey or black border around the sheet, or when you want to print an article larger without the broad margins. Cropping narrows the visible area of each page, so the content looks bigger and cleaner when you read or print it.

How cropping works in this tool

You set four percentages: how much to trim from the top, bottom, right and left. Each starts at 5%, and every side is kept between 0 and 40%: anything above 40 is treated as 40, and an empty field means 0, so nothing is trimmed from that side. The percentage is taken from the page's own size, so 10% off the top of an A4 page is roughly 3 cm.

Once the file is loaded, the first page appears with a red dashed frame, and the shaded area outside it is what will disappear. The frame moves as soon as you change a number, so you can tune the values while watching the result. On applying, each page's crop box (CropBox), the standard PDF setting for the visible area, is adjusted. The page is not redrawn, and text and image quality are untouched.

How to crop a PDF

1. 1
   Click "Select PDF File to Crop" or drag the file onto the box.
2. 2
   In the "Crop Margins Settings" panel, enter values for Top, Bottom, Right and Left Margin (%), watching the red frame on the first page.
3. 3
   Click "Crop & Apply Changes Now".
4. 4
   Open "Preview Cropped Document" and scroll through a few pages, then click "Download Cropped PDF". The file is named after yours, prefixed with cropped_.

Before you crop

• Cropping hides; it doesn't erase. Content outside the frame stays inside the file, can be revealed in PDF editors, and hidden text remains searchable and copyable. Don't use cropping to hide an account number or other confidential detail.
• For the same reason, the file doesn't get smaller after cropping. To reduce size, use Compress PDF.
• The same percentages apply to every page. If only one page needs trimming, extract it and crop it on its own.
• If some pages are upside down, start with Rotate PDF.

Limitations

• The live preview shows the first page only, so pages with a different layout may be cropped in a way you don't expect.
• There is no automatic crop that detects white margins; you choose the values.
• On pages stored with a rotation inside the file, sides are measured on the page's original orientation, so "top" may land on a different edge than the one you see.
• The most you can trim is 40% per side, so at least a fifth of the page's width and height always remains.
• Files with a password or permission restrictions are refused; open them first with Unlock PDF.

Where is the processing done?

Page boundaries are changed on your own device by pdf-lib running in the browser; no page passes through an outside server.

Crop PDF: frequently asked questions