How to crop a PDF without losing anything

Cropping is the least destructive edit you can make to a PDF, and the most misunderstood. Nothing is thrown away, nothing is re-compressed, and the whole thing takes seconds once you know which of the two kinds of crop you actually want.

Last reviewed October 2026. If a page like this is ever rewritten, the date moves with it.

What the crop box decides

Every PDF page carries a rectangle that says which part of the page a viewer should show. Printers, on-screen viewers and most other software honour it. Cropping an existing PDF means writing a smaller rectangle into the file.

Because it is a statement rather than an edit, it is lossless in the direction that matters: the text stays text, the images keep their resolution, and a page cropped on a laptop opens cropped on a phone. It also means the crop is easy to widen again in a full PDF editor — which is a convenience for you and a problem if you were hoping a crop would hide something.

Trimming the white edges off a scan

The usual reason to crop is that a scanner added its own margins: a black strip down one side, a centimetre of desk at the bottom, a page that sits slightly rotated inside a bigger white rectangle.

Drag a box that contains the whole of the real page and sits just outside the content, then apply it to every page. Checking the first few pages afterwards is worth the ten seconds — some scanners change their offset partway through a batch, and a page whose heading has been clipped is not obvious until it is printed or read carefully.

Keeping one part of a page

The other kind of crop is deliberate: a page that is mostly a large table or diagram, where you only need one column of it, or a scan that includes two pages side by side and you need the second one. Here the box is small on purpose, and the honest advice is to keep the original — a deliberate crop is the kind you may well want to widen again.

Why this is not a way to remove information

Covering a line with a crop looks like deleting it. It does not. The text is still in the file, still copyable, still findable by search, and still there for anyone who opens the document in an editor and enlarges the box.

The same is true of a black box drawn over text, which is a common and dangerous mistake in documents that get shared. If a detail must not travel, it has to be removed from the page, not hidden. Being clear about that is the whole reason this page exists.

Questions

Does cropping reduce the file size?

Almost never by a useful amount — the content is still in the file. Compressing rewrites what is stored; cropping only changes what is shown.

Can I crop just one page?

Yes. Leave the box unticked and draw on that page alone; the other pages keep whatever they had, untouched.

Does cropping work on a password-protected PDF?

A document that cannot be opened cannot be cropped, and this tool asks for no password. Remove the protection in whichever application set it, and crop the copy you are allowed to change.

Will the crop survive being printed?

Yes. Most printers use the crop box, so what you see in a viewer is what comes out. Check one page before a long run — a few tools ignore it, and a page that prints its full margins is only surprising once.

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