Crop PDF Online — Trim White Margins, Free
Cut the wide white margins off a PDF, or crop every page down to one area. Press Auto-crop and the tool measures where the content actually starts and ends; or drag the area you want to keep. The text stays real text — pages are not flattened into images — and nothing is uploaded.
Most cropping happens for reading rather than design. A scanned book page or an academic paper wastes a third of a tablet screen on margins; a slide deck exported to PDF has borders that waste ink; a scan comes out with a black edge where the lid did not close. Cropping changes the visible page area, so the same file reads better on a phone, an e-reader, or in print.
What cropping does to the file
A PDF page carries two rectangles: the MediaBox, which is the full sheet, and the CropBox, which is the part a reader displays. Cropping sets the CropBox, so the trimmed margins stop being shown and stop being printed — but the content outside is still inside the file and can be brought back by widening the box again. That is ideal for tidying a document and wrong for hiding anything sensitive: to remove content for good, use redaction instead.
Often part of a longer clean-up: rotate sideways scans, drop the pages you do not need, number the result, then compress it.
How to use Crop PDF
- Choose a PDF file. The first page opens in the preview.
- Press "Auto-crop margins", or drag on the page to pick the area to keep.
- Leave "Apply to every page" on, or turn it off to crop only the page you are looking at.
- Click "Crop & Download" to save the cropped PDF.
Features
- One-click auto-crop — Finds the edge of the real content and trims the white space around it.
- Drag to crop — Or choose the exact area yourself, on desktop or by touch.
- Text stays text — The page is not rasterised, so it is still selectable, searchable, and sharp at any zoom.
- Every page or just one — Crop the whole document or a single page.
- Shows the new page size — In points, as you adjust the crop.
- 100% browser-based — No upload, no watermark, no sign-up.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does cropping delete the content in the margins?
No. Cropping sets the page's CropBox, which controls what a reader shows and prints. The material outside stays in the file and can be revealed again by resetting the box. If your goal is to remove information rather than tidy the layout, use the redaction tool, which deletes the content.
Will the text still be selectable after cropping?
Yes. Nothing is converted to an image, so the text can still be selected, searched, and copied, and the page stays sharp at any zoom level. Croppers that flatten pages lose all of that.
How does auto-crop decide where the margins end?
It renders the page and scans the pixels for anything clearly darker than paper white, then keeps the rectangle that contains all of it plus a small border. On a clean scan this removes the white edges precisely; on a page with a scanning shadow along one edge, drag the area yourself instead.
Can I crop just one page?
Yes. Turn off "Apply the same crop to every page" and only the page in the preview is cropped. The others keep their original size.
Will the cropped PDF print smaller?
It prints the cropped area, which a printer will normally scale to fit the paper — so the content appears larger, with less white space around it. That is usually the point when trimming margins for reading or printing.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. The file is opened, rendered, and rewritten in your browser, so it never reaches a server.