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Crop margins off a PDF

Trim each edge by eye, in percentages that suit any page size.

Every tool runs entirely in your browser. Your files are never uploaded to a server.

Cropping moves the page boxes rather than rewriting content, so nothing is re-encoded and text stays sharp. Percentages are read in the orientation you see, so a rotated scan trims the edge you expect.

How to use Crop PDF

  1. Add your PDF. Drag it in or click to browse. Several files can be cropped with the same settings.
  2. Set each edge. Percentages rather than millimetres, so one setting suits mixed page sizes.
  3. Crop and download. Every page gets the same trim, and the file stays roughly its original size.

About cropping PDF margins

Cropping a PDF is a change to two rectangles rather than a change to the page. Every page carries a MediaBox, which is the sheet it was laid out on, and usually a CropBox, which is the part a viewer actually displays. Moving those boundaries inward hides the margins without touching a single content operator, which is why cropping is instant and lossless: no text is rasterised, no image is re-encoded, and vector artwork stays resolution-independent. The byte count can still move, sometimes sharply, because the document is rewritten as it is saved and a file that arrived uncompressed leaves compressed — but that is the container changing, not the content, and a size drop here never means anything was discarded. That property is also the honest limitation. Content outside the new boundary is concealed, not deleted, and anyone who resets the boxes gets it back — so cropping must never be used to remove sensitive information from a document you intend to share. Redaction is a different operation with different guarantees, and a tool that blurs the distinction is doing real harm. Two details make the difference between a crop that works on real documents and one that only works on clean exports. The first is that percentages beat measurements when a file mixes page sizes, which scanned and merged documents routinely do. The second is page rotation: a scanner commonly stores a landscape sheet as a portrait page carrying a quarter turn, and on such a page the edge displayed at the top is not the edge stored at the top. Both boxes are written together, because viewers and print dialogs disagree about which one governs, and setting only the CropBox leaves a page still reporting its original size to whatever reads the MediaBox.

Frequently asked questions

Does cropping delete the content outside the margin?
No, and this matters. Cropping changes the rectangle a viewer displays, so the content beyond it is hidden rather than removed and can be recovered by resetting the box. Cropping is not redaction. To remove something permanently, delete it before the PDF is made.
Why percentages instead of millimetres?
Because a percentage suits a document whose pages are not all the same size. Ten percent trims proportionally on an A4 page and on a photo page in the same file, where a fixed measurement would take too much off one and too little off the other.
What happens to pages my scanner rotated?
They trim the edge you can see. A PDF page carries a rotation separately from its content, so on a rotated page the stored left edge is displayed at the top. The percentages are mapped through that rotation, so "trim the top" means the visual top on every page.
Why did the file size change so much?
Not because anything was removed. Cropping only moves the page boxes, so every byte of content survives — but the document is rewritten on the way out, and a file that was originally saved without compression can come back noticeably smaller purely from that. On an already-compressed PDF the difference is close to nothing. Never read a size drop here as content having gone.
Can I crop different amounts from different pages?
Not in one pass — the settings apply to every page in the file. Split the document first if the pages genuinely need different treatment, crop each part, then merge the results back together.

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