Crop PDF

How to use Crop PDF

1. Choose a PDF file. The first page appears with a crop frame already placed inside it.
2. Drag the frame, its edges or its corners until it covers what you want to keep. You can also type exact top, right, bottom and left margins in millimetres, inches or points, or press Auto-detect margins to frame the content automatically.
3. Pick whether the crop applies to this page, every page or a page range, and choose Hide only or Remove.
4. Press Crop and save PDF to download the result.

Why crop a PDF

Scanned documents often arrive with dark borders, shadows from the scanner lid or large empty margins. Reports exported from slides or spreadsheets can include padding that wastes space on a phone or e-reader. Cropping lets you keep only the part that matters, so text appears larger when the page is fitted to the screen and printouts use the sheet more sensibly.

Cropping is also useful for pulling a single figure or table out of a page, for removing running headers before sharing an excerpt, or for giving a set of mixed-size pages one consistent frame.

How the crop is stored

A PDF page has several rectangles. The MediaBox is the full canvas. The CropBox is the visible window that viewers show and printers use by default. This tool always writes the CropBox so that the page looks cropped everywhere. If you choose Remove it also writes the MediaBox, and updates TrimBox, BleedBox and ArtBox when the page already has them, so no other box sticks out past your frame.

Margins you see on screen are measured on the page as displayed. If a page is rotated, the tool converts your frame back to the correct position in the underlying page, so top still means top.

• Hide only is reversible by anyone who edits the page boxes.
• Remove gives more consistent results in viewers that ignore the CropBox.
• Neither option deletes content from the file.

Tips and limits

For scans, try Auto-detect with a threshold of about 235 to 245 and a few points of padding, then check the result and nudge the frame. Very noisy scans may need a lower threshold so specks of dust are not treated as content. Pages that are almost blank are left unchanged when detecting per page.

The preview is drawn at screen resolution, so detection is accurate to roughly a point. Password-protected files must be unlocked first. All work happens inside your browser tab and nothing is uploaded.

Why use this crop pdf tool

• Draggable frame with exact numbers. Move and resize the frame with a mouse, pen or finger, or type margins in millimetres, inches or points. Both ways stay in sync, so you can drag roughly and then fine-tune.
• Aspect presets. Lock the frame to A4, Letter or square proportions, in portrait or landscape, when the cropped pages must fit a standard sheet or a square layout.
• Auto-detect white borders. The tool scans the drawn page for anything darker than a threshold you control and frames it, with optional padding. It can do this separately for every page, which suits scans with uneven borders.
• Correct on rotated and offset pages. Pages with a rotation setting or a page box that does not start at zero are handled, so the area you see is the area you keep.

Frequently asked questions

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