What does cropping actually do?

It sets a smaller CropBox so viewers and printers show only the area you defined — the original content is preserved inside the PDF.

Crop PDF

Trim page margins uniformly — useful for scanned documents with whitespace.

Drop a PDF

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Accepted: PDF · Files stay on your device

How to crop pdf

1
Upload your PDF.
2
Set the margin to trim (in points).
3
Download the cropped PDF.

Understanding crop pdf

Cropping changes the CropBox, the rectangle a viewer displays. The content outside it is still present in the file but is no longer shown or printed, which makes cropping reversible in principle and unsuitable for hiding secrets.

The common use is reclaiming margin: scanned books and photocopied documents often carry two centimetres of grey border that waste screen space on tablets and e-readers.

Because nothing is re-rendered, cropped pages remain fully searchable and print at their original resolution.

When you would use it

—Trimming scanner shadow from the edges of a book scan.
—Removing wide white margins so a document fills an e-reader screen.
—Cutting off a printer's crop marks and colour bars from a press-ready file.
—Focusing an engineering drawing on the drawing itself rather than the sheet frame.

Practical tips

Convert millimetres to points by multiplying by 2.835 — a 10 mm margin is roughly 28 pt.
Crop conservatively; text sitting close to the edge is easy to clip by accident.
To permanently destroy the cropped-away content, export the cropped file to images and rebuild it as a PDF.

Troubleshooting

Content I need got cut off: Reduce the offsets and try again — the source data is untouched, so nothing is lost permanently.
One page crops differently: Pages with different media sizes need different offsets; crop them in separate passes.

Frequently asked questions

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