When to crop a PDF
Scans often come with wide white borders or a black shadow along one edge, and some documents have margins far larger than you need. Cropping trims each page down to the part that matters, which makes the content larger when viewed on a phone, saves paper when printed, and lets you pull just one chart or paragraph out of a busy page.
Choosing the crop area
Crop PDF shows a preview of your page. Drag out a rectangle around the area to keep, then drag its corners and edges to fine-tune it or drag inside it to move it. Margin presets (small, medium, and large) trim an even border off all sides with a single click, and you can type exact values if you need precision.
By default the same crop area is applied to every page, which works well for scans of uniform pages. If your pages differ, switch off “apply to all” and set a separate crop area for each page.
Important: cropping hides, it does not erase
Cropping works by changing each page’s visible area. The content outside the crop is hidden from view in normal PDF readers, but it is still stored in the file and can be revealed by software that ignores the crop. Do not use cropping to remove confidential information before sharing a document. To remove content for good, delete the pages that contain it with Delete PDF Pages, or rebuild the page from a screenshot.
Because the underlying content is untouched, cropping does not reduce file size and does not affect text search.
Tips
Crop a little loosely: removing too much can clip descenders, page numbers, or the edge of a table. Check a few pages of the result, especially the first and last, before sending it on. If you need pages in a standard paper size after cropping, run Resize PDF. Cropping runs in your browser, so the file is not uploaded.