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Crop PDF

Crop PDF pages right here: trim the margins with millimetre inputs, or set a centred A4 or US Letter window on all pages or just a range like 1-3, 7. Page one is previewed with the kept area outlined before you commit, and the download is named <your-file>-cropped.pdf. Cropping changes the visible page box — text, vectors and images are copied untouched — and the file never leaves your browser. Free, no signup, no watermark.

Choose a PDF file

No file loaded yet.

Page preview — page 1, as it is displayed

Load a PDF to see page 1 drawn here. The shaded strips are the margins you are trimming; the dashed outline marks the area that will be kept.

Apply the crop to

Pages to crop

Commas separate entries; a run of pages is written 1-3 and a single page is just 7. This box is used only when the scope above is set to Specific pages.

Kept area on page 1–

Margins to trim

Trim from the top (mm)

Trim from the right (mm)

Trim from the bottom (mm)

Trim from the left (mm)

Margins are millimetres, converted with 1 mm = 2.834645669 pt (72 pt per inch). The A4 and US Letter presets set a centred window of that size instead of margins, so the four boxes are switched off while one of those two presets is active; trim again or press Reset to go back to margins.

What cropping does, next to the controls that do it: it changes the visible page box. The margins you trim stop being displayed and the page is shown at the smaller size. The cropped-away content is not deleted from the file — it stays in the PDF and a PDF editor can restore it by setting the crop box back, so this is not a permanent erase and this page never claims to be one. Do not use cropping to hide text you need to remove: the text is still there and still extractable.

Nothing is added to your document either — no watermark, no stamp, no extra page — and nothing is uploaded: the file is opened and re-saved inside your browser, so no copy is stored on a server.

A4 means a centred 595.28 × 841.89 pt window and US Letter a centred 612 × 792 pt window: both crop, never scale. A page smaller than the target keeps its own size in that direction, because cropping cannot enlarge anything.

Choose a PDF file to begin.

FileNo file loaded

Pages–

Original size–

Pages cropped in the last run0

Output size–

Output file name–

No PDF loaded yet. The crop box of every page you crop will be listed here, in points and millimetres, after you run it.

What this PDF cropper does

This page crops PDF pages in your browser. You pick a file, you decide how many millimetres to trim from each edge — or you ask for a centred A4 or US Letter window — you choose whether that applies to every page or to a range such as 1-3, 7, and you press Crop PDF. Page one is drawn by the pdf.js renderer so you can see the shaded margins and the dashed outline of the area that will be kept, and the readout tells you the resulting page size in both millimetres and points before and after the run. Then you download a new file named after your own, for example report-cropped.pdf.

Every PDF page carries two rectangles. The media box is the physical page: the paper size the document was written for. The crop box is the window a viewer is supposed to show, and it can be smaller than the media box and sit anywhere inside it. A print shop uses exactly this mechanism: a page is laid out with bleed, and the crop box marks the trim. This tool changes the crop box, and only the crop box. It computes the new rectangle from the box each page already had — usually the media box, sometimes a crop box that is already smaller — subtracts the margins you asked for, converts your millimetres with 1 mm = 2.834645669 pt, and writes the result back with pdf-lib.

Because only a rectangle changes, the pages themselves are copied as they are. Text stays vector text, so it is still selectable, still copyable and still searchable. Line art and logos stay sharp at any zoom. Photographs and scans keep their original pixels and resolution, because nothing is re-rendered or re-encoded. The page count stays the same, the rotation value of every page stays the same, and the file size changes by roughly the size of the box arithmetic itself. And nothing is uploaded: the document is read from your disk, edited in memory and saved back to your device, with no server involved at any point.

How to crop a PDF

Choose a PDF file. The page shows the file name, the page count and the original size, and draws page 1 in the preview with the kept area outlined. Nothing leaves your browser.
Set the crop. Either type the millimetres to trim from the top, right, bottom and left boxes, or press Trim 10 mm margins for an even trim, or press A4 or US Letter for a centred window of that paper size. The kept-area readout and the preview update as you type, so you can see the resulting page size before you commit to it.
Choose the pages. Leave the scope on All pages, or switch it to Specific pages and type a list such as 1-3, 7. Pages you leave out keep the box they already had.
Press Crop PDF. Every selected page is checked first: if the margins would leave less than 20 pt — about 7.06 mm — in either direction, the run stops with a message naming the page and the size it would have been left with, and no file is produced.
Read the readout. The summary lists the crop box of each page you cropped before and after, in points and millimetres, together with the output size and the output file name.
Press Download to save the result as <your-file>-cropped.pdf. The original on your disk is never modified, and loading the same file again starts from its original page boxes.

Worked example

The test file used here was built for this page: mixed.pdf, 6 pages, 4,440 bytes (4.34 KB). It is deliberately awkward. Every page has a different width, so a page's identity survives the rewrite and can be checked afterwards; the widths in points are 595.28, 612, 700, 500, 520 and 540 against heights of 841.89, 792, 900, 800, 800 and 760. Page 4 is stored with a rotation of 90° and page 5 with 180°, and page 6 already carried a smaller crop box — 500 × 720 pt at x = 20, y = 20 — inside its 540 × 760 pt media box. Every number below is what this page reported in a browser on that file, and every result was then re-read from the downloaded PDF with pdf-lib and with qpdf to confirm it.

Trim 10 mm from every edge, all pages (the default). 10 mm is 28.35 pt. The readout listed: page 1 (A4, 595.28 × 841.89 pt) 210 × 297 mm → 190 × 277 mm (538.59 × 785.20 pt); page 2 (612 × 792 pt) 215.90 × 279.40 mm → 195.90 × 259.40 mm; page 3 (700 × 900 pt) 246.94 × 317.50 mm → 226.94 × 297.50 mm; page 4 — stored with a 90° rotation, so it displays as 282.22 × 176.39 mm — 282.22 × 176.39 mm → 262.22 × 156.39 mm; page 5 (520 × 800 pt, rotated 180°) 183.44 × 282.22 mm → 163.44 × 262.22 mm; page 6, whose crop box was already 500 × 720 pt rather than the whole page, 176.39 × 254 mm → 156.39 × 234 mm. The download, mixed-cropped.pdf, came out at 2,902 bytes. Re-reading every page of that download confirmed all six crop boxes to the last rounding step, all six page boxes unchanged, and /Rotate 90 and /Rotate 180 still on pages 4 and 5; qpdf --check reported no syntax or stream errors. The drop in file size is not the crop: the test file was written without object streams and pdf-lib writes them, so the re-save accounts for the difference — the crop boxes are the only page data that differs. Two 10 mm trims take 20 mm off a 210 mm page and 20 mm off a 176.39 mm page, which is 9.5% of the first and 11.3% of the second: plain arithmetic on the numbers the readout printed.
A4 preset on all six pages. Page 1 was already A4 and kept its 595.28 × 841.89 pt box. Page 3 (700 × 900 pt) came out as a centred A4 window: 210 × 297 mm, sitting 18.47 mm in from the left and 10.25 mm down from the top. Page 2, a 612 × 792 pt US Letter page, came out 210 × 279.40 mm — the A4 window is narrower than Letter but shorter than Letter is tall, so the height was left alone. That is the crop-never-scale rule in real numbers, and there is no control on this page that would have stretched it. Pages 4, 5 and 6 show identical values on both sides of the arrow in the readout, because their displayed sizes (282.22 × 176.39 mm, 183.44 × 282.22 mm and 176.39 × 254 mm) are smaller than A4 in every direction, so the preset could only have written each of them the box it already had. Output: 2,873 bytes.
US Letter preset on pages 2 and 3 only. The scope was switched to Specific pages with the range 2-3. Page 2 was already 612 × 792 pt, so the readout showed 215.90 × 279.40 mm → 215.90 × 279.40 mm; page 3, the 700 × 900 pt page, came out as a centred 215.90 × 279.40 mm window, 15.52 mm from the left and 19.05 mm down. Pages 1, 4, 5 and 6 were not written at all: decompressing the download with qpdf shows /CropBox entries on pages 2, 3 and 6 only — and page 6's is the one it already carried. A range crop leaves the pages you did not name alone, down to the absence of the box entry. Output: 2,837 bytes.
A refusal, on purpose. With 90 mm in all four boxes and the scope on All pages, the run stopped and produced no file, saying: “Page 4 is 176.39 × 282.22 mm and these margins are wider than the page in one direction, so nothing would be left of it. Reduce the margins, or leave page 4 out of the range.” Nothing was written and no download appeared, because the pages are all checked before the first one is modified.

And the part people get wrong: nothing was deleted. Every page of the test file carries a small green 4 × 4 pt mark drawn at its bottom-left corner, which in the 10 mm run sits inside the trimmed margin. Decompressing the cropped download with qpdf --qdf still finds all six copies of that mark's drawing operators (0 0.6 0.2 rg), exactly as in the original, along with all six text strings — the text in the trimmed strip is still real, extractable text. Loading the cropped file again and setting each crop box back to the page box returned six pages of exactly the original size, and that restored file's page streams matched the original's byte for byte. That is what the note beside the controls means: cropping changes the visible window, not the content, and this page does not pretend otherwise.

Who is this PDF cropper for?

Anyone tidying up a scan: flatbed and phone scanners leave a grey or black edge along one side, and a few millimetres trimmed from that edge makes a page look like a document instead of a photograph. The preview shows exactly how much of the page goes.
Office and admin work: shrink the wide white margins a form template or a report export carries, so it reads better on a phone, before a file is filed, printed or emailed on.
Print preparation: a file laid out with bleed can be cropped to the final trim size with a centred A4 or US Letter window, without a desktop publishing application and without uploading the artwork anywhere.
Students and researchers: crop a lecture handout or a figure pack down to the content, keep the text selectable so notes and searching still work, and leave the rest of the pages untouched by cropping only the range you name.
People handling confidential papers: contracts, payslips, medical letters and HR files can be cropped on a work laptop, because the document is opened in the browser and never sent to a third party.

What cropping changes in the file — and what it does not

Two rectangles decide how a PDF page looks, and both are measured in points with the origin at the bottom-left corner of the page. The media box is the physical page. The crop box is the window the viewer shows, and a viewer is required to display only that window; anything outside it is clipped away on screen. This tool writes the crop box as setCropBox(x, y, width, height), computed from the box the page already had minus your margins, and it leaves the media box exactly as it found it. That single change is why pages can be cropped, re-cropped and later un-cropped without a single byte of drawing data being lost.

The trim is exact arithmetic, not a percentage and not an estimate. One millimetre is 2.834645669 points, so a 10 mm margin is 28.35 pt, and the tool prints both units so you can check the result against a ruler or against the values in your own PDF reader. If the arithmetic would leave less than 20 pt in either direction, the page is refused rather than quietly clamped, because a page box 3 mm wide is almost always a mistake and a tool that silently produces one is not being honest about what it did.

Rotation is handled, not ignored. A PDF page with a rotation of 90° or 270° keeps its crop box in the page's own unrotated coordinates. Trim 10 mm from the top of a sideways page without thinking about that, and a naive tool takes it off the wrong edge. This page reads the rotation of each selected page and maps your four margins onto the correct edges, so top, right, bottom and left always mean what you see in the preview, whatever the page's stored rotation is.

What you might expect a PDF cropper to do	What this page actually does
Delete the content in the trimmed margins	Nothing is deleted. The content stays in the file and a PDF editor can bring it back by restoring the crop box.
Scale or resize the page to A4	No scaling at all. A4 and US Letter set a centred window inside the page's existing box; a smaller page keeps its own size.
Rasterise the pages to make them smaller	Nothing is re-rendered or re-encoded. Text stays text, vectors stay vector, images keep their pixels.
Remove the paper's unused white space physically	The page box is what changes. The white space is simply outside the window that is displayed.
Stamp or watermark the result	Nothing is added: no watermark, no stamp, no extra page.

That table is a description of the code on this page, not a promise about results. The only measurements you get are the ones printed after a run: the crop box of every cropped page before and after, in points and millimetres.

Common use cases

Trimming the black or grey edge a scanner leaves down one side of every page, at a millimetre value you choose rather than one a website chose for you.
Cutting a slide export or a wide report down to a standard A4 window so it prints and previews consistently on any device.
Reducing the huge white border a screengrab, a plot or a CAD drawing carries, to make the content as large as possible on screen.
Cropping a bundle of pages to the same trim size before sending it to a printer, while leaving mixed-size pages inside the document alone.
Cutting an appendix or a figure — a set of pages you name in the range box — without touching the rest of the document.
Making a scanned form fit a fixed upload window, when the only thing standing in the way is the scanned margin around the page.

Pro tips

Check the dashed outline first. The preview on page 1 marks the kept area before anything is written, which is cheaper than cropping, downloading and reopening the file to see what happened.
Work from the outside in. Trim 10 mm from all four edges as a starting point, look at the kept size in the readout, then increase one edge at a time. Because every run starts from the original page boxes, you can re-run as many times as you like without compounding the trim.
Watch the sizes, not the margins. The readout gives the resulting page size in millimetres and points. If you know the trim size you need, that number is the one to compare, not the margin boxes.
Use the range box on mixed documents. When page sizes differ inside one file, set the margins from the pages you care about, then crop only those pages and leave the rest as they were.
Do not crop to redact. A trimmed area is still in the file, still extractable and still recoverable. If information has to go, remove the content or the page itself in an editor that can do that.
Keep the original. The download is a separate file ending in -cropped.pdf, so a crop you do not like costs nothing: your original stays exactly as it was.

FAQ

Are my PDF files uploaded to a server?

No. The crop runs entirely in your browser: the file is read from your disk with the browser file API, the page boxes are changed in memory with pdf-lib, and the result is handed back to you as a download. Nothing is sent over the network, no copy is stored anywhere, and no account or email address is needed.

What exactly does cropping change in the file?

It writes the page's crop box — the rectangle a viewer shows — as x, y, width and height in points, derived from the box the page already had minus the margins you set. The media box, which is the physical page, is left alone, the page content stream is copied as it is, the page count stays the same, and the rotation value of every page is unchanged.

Is the cropped-away content deleted?

No. Cropping only changes which part of the page is displayed. The text, lines and images that were in the trimmed margins are still stored in the file, and a PDF editor can restore them by setting the crop box back. This page offers no permanent-erase option and makes no such claim.

Can I use this to redact or hide sensitive information?

No, and you should not. Cropping a PDF is a display change, not a removal: text in the trimmed area is still in the file, can still be extracted and can be brought back by changing the crop box. For real redaction, remove the content or the page in a PDF editor rather than cropping it out of view.

Does cropping reduce quality or turn my pages into images?

No. Nothing is re-rendered, re-compressed or rasterised, so text stays selectable, searchable and copyable, vector lines stay sharp, and images keep their original pixels and resolution. The file size barely moves, because the only thing written is one small rectangle per cropped page plus the re-save of the document.

How do I trim a 10 mm margin from every page?

Load the PDF, press the Trim 10 mm margins preset, leave the scope on All pages and press Crop PDF. All four margin boxes are set to 10 mm, which is 28.35 pt, and each page's crop box shrinks by that amount on every edge. The kept-area readout and the preview show the resulting page size before you run it.

How do I crop a PDF to A4 or US Letter size?

Press the A4 or the US Letter preset and run the crop. Each selected page gets a centred window of exactly 595.28 by 841.89 pt for A4, or 612 by 792 pt for US Letter, placed inside the box that page already had. The orientation follows the page as displayed, so a landscape page gets a landscape window.

Does the A4 preset resize or scale my page?

No. The A4 and US Letter presets crop to a centred window of that size; they never scale the page and never enlarge it. A page that is already smaller than the target in one direction keeps its own size in that direction, so a 612 by 792 pt page cropped to A4 keeps its full 792 pt height and loses only the width difference. This page has no scale or resize option at all.

How do I crop only some pages, like 1-3 and 7?

Set the scope to Specific pages and type the pages in the range field, for example 1-3, 7. Commas separate entries and a run of pages is written 1-3. Pages you leave out keep the page box they already had, and the tool tells you how many pages the run touched.

Which edge is top on a rotated page?

Top, right, bottom and left always refer to the page as it is displayed, which is what you see in the preview. A PDF page with a rotation of 90 or 270 degrees stores its crop box in the page's own unrotated coordinates, so the tool maps your margins onto the correct page edges for you instead of applying them blindly.

Can I crop a scanned PDF?

Yes. A scan is one large image per page, and cropping changes only the visible page box, so the scanned image keeps its original pixels — nothing is resampled or recompressed. Trimming the grey or black edge a scanner leaves along one side is the classic use, and the preview shows exactly how much of the page will be kept.

Is this PDF cropper free, and does it add a watermark?

Yes, it is free, with no sign-up, no email gate and no limit on how many files you crop, and nothing is added to your document: no watermark, no stamp, no extra page. The download is named after your own file, for example report-cropped.pdf, and the original on your disk is never modified.