Crop PDF

Trim the edges off a PDF with four percentage sliders

This tool removes the margins around your page content by shrinking the visible area on every page. You set how much to cut from each edge — top, right, bottom and left — as a percentage of the page, and the trimmed file downloads when you click Crop. There's no dragging a box on a preview here: you move four sliders (each 0–45%) and the same crop is applied uniformly to all pages.

When you actually need to crop

• Scanned documents with black or grey borders. A scanner or photocopier often leaves a dark frame or skewed edge around the real page. Pull each slider in a few percent until the border is outside the visible area.
• PDFs built from photos. If you turned phone photos into a PDF and each page has a band of desk, table or shadow around the document, cropping tightens the frame to the paper.
• Slide decks exported with huge margins. Presentation exports and some report generators pad pages with white space. Cropping makes the content fill the page for printing or embedding.
• Reclaiming reading space on a tablet or e-reader. Trimming wide margins lets the remaining content render larger, since the device fits the crop box to the display.
• Hiding a footer band. A consistent footer (page numbers, a printed URL, a confidentiality stamp) sitting in the bottom margin can be hidden by trimming the bottom edge.

How cropping works under the hood

Every PDF page carries a MediaBox (the full physical sheet) and can also define a CropBox — the rectangle a viewer actually displays and prints. This tool sets the CropBox; it does not touch the MediaBox or the page content streams. Your percentages are converted to a fraction of each page's width and height and subtracted from the corresponding edge, so a 10% left value moves the left crop edge inward by one tenth of the page width.

The practical consequence: the content outside the crop box is hidden, not deleted. It's still in the file, and anyone who widens the CropBox in another editor gets it back. If a document must be genuinely stripped of off-page content (for redaction), cropping is the wrong tool.

Because the crop is a percentage rather than fixed millimetres, it adapts to mixed page sizes in one file, but landscape and portrait pages then get proportionally different absolute trims.

Practical tips

• Start small. 3–5% per edge clears most scanner borders; 45% is the maximum and rarely what you need.
• The crop is the same on every page, so it works best when your content sits in roughly the same place on each page. Cover pages or full-bleed images may end up over-cropped.
• Crop before you print or before you run Number Pages — a page number stamped into a margin you later crop away will disappear.

When to use a different tool

• Need pages scaled to A4 or Letter rather than trimmed? Use Resize PDF, which scales content proportionally to a target paper size instead of hiding edges.
• Just want a smaller file? Cropping barely changes size because the hidden content stays. Run the result through Compress PDF.
• Want to reorder, delete or rotate specific pages, or crop only a subset? Organize PDF handles per-page changes; pair it with Split PDF or Extract PDF to pull out the pages you want to treat differently.
• Pages turned the wrong way? Rotate PDF fixes orientation without trimming.