Crop the margins off a PDF

Scanned pages arrive with black borders. Documents printed to PDF carry margins nobody wants on a tablet. Cropping trims the edges off every page in one action, and the preview shows the result as you drag rather than after you export.

or drop a file anywhere on this panel

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How it works

  1. 01Open the PDF.
  2. 02Drag the four margin sliders. The preview crops as you go.
  3. 03Check the reported page size — it updates live.
  4. 04Export.

Every page at once

Cropping is set as four percentages rather than a dragged box, because the reason people crop a PDF is almost always to remove the same band from every page — a scanner edge, a header, a printed footer. Four numbers do that in one action instead of once per page.

Cropping hides, it does not delete

This is the part most tools do not tell you. A crop changes the visible area of the page; whatever was in the margin is still inside the file and can be recovered by anyone who removes the crop. If something sensitive is out there, cropping is not the tool — redaction is, and it destroys the content rather than hiding it.

The preview is the result

The page image you see is clipped to exactly the region that will be exported, and the size shown in the panel is the size the exported page will actually be. Both the display box and the page box are set on export, so the file really is smaller rather than merely displaying smaller.

Questions

Can I crop one page differently from the others?
Not yet. Per-page cropping with a dragged rectangle is a natural addition and the model already supports different crops per page; the interface for it does not exist yet.
Does cropping reduce the file size?
Barely. The content is still there, just not displayed. If you want a smaller file, use Compress.
Is the cropped-away content really still in the file?
Yes, and we would rather say so than let you assume otherwise. Open the exported file with Find hidden text and you can see for yourself.