Skip to main content
PDFBase

Crop PDF

Local

Crop PDF page margins and content

All Tools
Crop PDF
Local
Tool Details
Input formatsPDF
Output formatPDF
Max file size100 MB
Max files1
ProcessingLocal
Related Tools

Rotate PDF

Rotate PDF pages 90°, 180°, or 270°

Split PDF

Split a PDF into smaller files or page ranges

Change Page Size

Rescale PDF pages to A4, Letter, Legal, A3 or A5

Privacy First

Your files are processed entirely in your browser. Nothing is uploaded to any server.

How do I crop the margins of a PDF?

Add your PDF, set how much to trim from the top, right, bottom, and left, choose which pages to apply it to, then crop and download. The tool sets a new crop box on each selected page, so viewers and printers show only the area you kept. It runs entirely inside this browser tab.

About the Crop PDF

Crop PDF pages to remove unwanted margins or focus on specific content areas.

  • Trim the thick white margins off a scanned book or journal article so the text fills an e-reader or tablet screen.
  • Remove a printer control strip, staple shadow or scanner edge from the border of every page.
  • Cut away a header or footer band that carries a stale watermark, draft label or internal file path.
  • Crop by exact point measurements per side rather than dragging a rectangle and hoping the pages stay consistent.

How to use the Crop PDF tool

  1. 1

    Upload PDF file

    Select PDF file from your device or drag file into the upload area.

  2. 2

    Choose settings

    Choose settings such as Top margin, Right margin, Bottom margin before processing.

  3. 3

    Crop PDF

    Run the Crop PDF tool to create the PDF output.

  4. 4

    Download the result

    Download the finished file. The original file stays on your device and is not uploaded.

Does cropping delete the content outside the crop area?

No, and this is the one thing to understand before sharing a cropped file. Cropping sets the visible region of each page; the content outside it is hidden from view but still present in the document, and it can be recovered by resetting the crop box. Cropping is a layout tool, not a redaction tool — if something must be genuinely unrecoverable, remove the page or edit the source before exporting.

What units are the crop margins in?

Margins are given in PDF points, where 72 points make one inch and roughly 28 points make one centimetre. So trimming a 25 mm margin means entering about 71. The tool refuses a crop that would leave a page smaller than 24 points in either direction, which stops a mistyped value from producing a document of unreadable slivers.

Why crop a PDF before printing or reading on a tablet?

Academic papers and scanned books carry wide margins that waste screen space on an e-reader, where the text is then rendered too small to read comfortably. Trimming the white space lets the remaining content fill the display. The same trick removes scanner artefacts — black edges, the shadow of a book gutter — from documents that are otherwise fine.

Are my files uploaded when cropping a PDF?

No. The crop box is written to the document locally, in this tab, with no upload step and no conversion server involved at any point.

How to do this offline, on the command line

Cropping is a CropBox change; nothing is removed from the file, only hidden from view.

Ghostscript

macOS: brew install ghostscript · Debian/Ubuntu: apt install ghostscript

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -c "[/CropBox [36 36 576 756] /PAGES pdfmark" -f scan.pdf -sOutputFile=cropped.pdf

Coordinates are in points from the bottom-left corner. pdfcrop, shipped with TeX Live, will compute tight margins for you automatically.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does cropping a PDF do?
Cropping adjusts each page’s visible area, trimming unwanted margins, scanner borders, or surrounding whitespace so the content fills the page when viewed or printed.
Is the cropped content deleted?
No. Cropping sets the page’s crop box — viewers hide the trimmed area, but the underlying data remains in the file. If you need content permanently removed for privacy, use a redaction tool instead.
Can I crop every page at once?
Yes. The same margins are applied to all pages, which is exactly what you want for uniformly scanned documents or slide decks with excess whitespace.
Why crop a PDF before sharing or printing?
Trimming dead space makes content larger and more readable on screens, removes distracting scan edges, and prevents printers from shrinking your content to fit oversized margins.

Need More Tools?

Explore our collection of 58 free PDF tools, all with privacy-first processing.

Browse All Tools