Crop PDF
Drag a box over the preview to crop. The crop applies to every page. Everything runs in your browser — your file never leaves your device.
Drag the box to move it, drag a corner to resize. The crop is applied to all pages.
How to crop a PDF
- Choose a PDF — the first page appears as a preview.
- Drag the box to frame what you want to keep; drag a corner to resize.
- Press Crop PDF — the cropped file downloads automatically.
Clean up scans with oversized margins
Documents digitized on a flatbed or with a phone camera almost always arrive with wide, uneven borders: the scanner captured the whole platen, not just the page. Those dead margins make the actual text smaller when the file is viewed on a tablet or phone, and they look unprofessional when you forward the document to a client or attach it to an application.
Cropping fixes this in seconds. Set a crop box that hugs the content, apply it across the document, and every page displays edge to edge. It is also the quickest way to remove hole punch shadows, fax headers, timestamps and the dark strips that appear when a small receipt is scanned on letter size paper. If the scan is also sideways, straighten it first with the rotate tool and crop afterwards.
Prepare figures for papers, slides and print
Cropping is not only for cleanup. Researchers and students use it to isolate a chart, table or diagram from a report page so it can be dropped into a thesis, a paper or a slide deck as a tight, well framed figure. Instead of taking a blurry screenshot, you crop the page to the region you need and keep the original vector quality, which stays sharp at any zoom level.
Print jobs benefit too. When you trim empty margins, the remaining content scales up to fill the sheet, so handouts and posters come out larger and easier to read without changing the paper size. Some journals and university templates also enforce exact page dimensions, and a precise crop is often the fastest way to meet that requirement.
Is it private?
Yes. Everything runs inside your web browser, using your own device. Nothing is uploaded to any server, so your documents stay completely private.
Frequently asked questions
Does cropping a PDF reduce its file size?
Usually not by much. Cropping changes the visible page area, but the content and images outside the crop typically remain stored in the file. If your goal is a smaller file, run the cropped document through the Compress PDF tool afterwards.
Is the crop permanent, or can someone undo it?
The crop is written into the page geometry of the downloaded file, and every standard viewer will show only the cropped area. However, the trimmed content may still exist in the file underneath, so do not rely on cropping to hide sensitive information. For true removal, redaction is the safer approach.
Can I crop a PDF on my phone?
Yes. The tool runs entirely in your browser, so it works in mobile Safari and Chrome the same way it does on a desktop. Very large scans may take a little longer to preview on older phones, but there is no separate app to install.