Crop a PDF

Two different jobs get called cropping: taking the ragged edges off a scan, and cutting a page down to the part that matters. Both are the same move — drag a box around what you want to keep, on one page or on all of them.

How it works

1. Add the PDFThe first page is drawn in the browser so you can see what you are cropping. The file is not uploaded while you decide.
2. Drag a box around what to keepAnything outside the box stops being shown. Tick "use this box on every page" when a scanner has given every page the same white edges.
3. Save the cropped PDFThe result is the same document with a smaller page box. If the box was the same on every page, the whole file is done in one pass.

What a crop actually changes

A PDF page carries a box that tells a viewer which part of the page to show. Cropping writes a smaller one, so nothing is re-drawn and no quality is spent: the text is still text you can select and search, and the images are still at their original resolution.

The one thing that does not change is the size of the file. The bytes covered by the old box are still in there — cropping changes what is shown, not what is stored. If you need the file to be smaller as well, that is a compression job, and it is a separate one.

Taking the edges off a scan

A flatbed scan almost always arrives with a strip of desk down one side and a wider margin than the original had. Drag the box so that it sits just outside the content on all four sides, with the whole page inside it, then tick "use this box on every page": pages that came off the same scanner have the same offset, so one box fixes the lot.

Leave a little room. A box that sits exactly on the first line of text looks tight on a printed page, and a box that cuts into the text cannot be undone by widening it later in a viewer that does not know what was there.

When the pages are not alike

Untick the box and draw on each page separately — useful for a document that mixes portrait and landscape pages, or a bundle where only the receipts need trimming. Pages you do not draw on are left exactly as they were, so a crop on page 3 does not quietly affect page 4.

A crop is not a redaction

It is worth being blunt about this, because a crop looks like a way to hide something. It is not. The words under a cropped area are still in the file, still searchable, and still there for anyone who selects the text or opens the page in an editor and widens the box again.

If something has to be gone, it has to be removed from the page rather than covered up. This tool does not do that, and it does not pretend to.

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