Crop PDF

1. Choose your PDF, or drop it onto the box. It opens in your browser, so the file never leaves your device.
2. Drag the edges or corners of the blue box on the preview. The shaded part is what will be cut away. Drag inside the box to move it.
3. Or type the amounts to trim from the top, right, bottom and left, in millimetres or inches.
4. Check the other pages with the arrows, then click Crop PDF and download.

You get a new copy named yourfile-cropped.pdf; the original is untouched. Rotated and landscape pages are cropped the way they look on screen.

All pages trims the same amount from every page, which is what you want for scans and documents where every page has the same margins. If one page is smaller than the rest and the crop would leave almost nothing of it, the tool tells you which page.

Only page … crops just the page in the preview and leaves the rest as they are. To give a few pages different crops, crop one, download, open the new file and crop the next.

Click Remove white margins. The tool looks at every page, finds where the text and pictures stop, and fills in the trim amounts so the crop ends just outside the content, with a small gap so nothing touches the edge. It uses the same crop for every page, small enough that nothing on any page is cut, which keeps the pages looking even.

This is handy for slides saved as PDF, papers with wide margins that you want to read on a phone or e-reader, and charts or drawings that need tight edges. It only removes white space: a grey or black scanner border counts as content, so drag the edges in by hand for those.

Cropping can only make a page smaller. To reach a size, subtract it from the page you have and split the difference between the two sides. An A4 page is 210 × 297 mm and a US Letter page is 215.9 × 279.4 mm (8.5 × 11 in).

The status line under the preview shows the size each page will end up, so you can check before downloading. One inch is 25.4 mm.

No. Cropping a PDF hides the edges rather than cutting them off: PDF readers show and print only the area you kept, but everything outside it is still in the file. That has three consequences:

• Don't crop to hide private information. Anyone with a PDF editor can bring the hidden part back. Black it out with proper redaction instead.
• The file doesn't get smaller. Use Compress PDF for that, or Delete PDF pages to drop whole pages.
• Printers may enlarge cropped pages. “Fit to page” scales the smaller page up to fill the paper. Choose “Actual size” in the print settings to print at the real size.