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PDF Crop

Visually crop PDF pages to any rectangle — trim white margins, isolate a chart, or clean up scanner edges right in your browser.

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About this tool

PDF Crop lets you cut a PDF page down to just the area you care about by dragging a rectangle on a live preview. Whether you are tightening up giant white margins from a poorly exported export, isolating a single chart from a research paper, or cleaning up the dead band that sometimes appears around scanned documents, the same gesture works: drop in your file, drag the keep-area on the preview canvas, and either apply that crop to the current page or to every page in the document. The tool runs entirely in your browser using pdf.js for rendering and pdf-lib for writing, which means your PDF never leaves the device — useful for confidential contracts, draft reports, or HR paperwork that should not pass through someone else's server. The crop changes the visible page box (CropBox) rather than rasterising, so text remains selectable and image quality is preserved.

Why use it

  • Browser-Only Privacy: The PDF is parsed and rewritten on your device — nothing is uploaded to a server, ideal for confidential or NDA-bound files.

  • Visual Drag-to-Select: A preview canvas shows your page so you can mark the keep-area precisely instead of guessing pixel coordinates.

  • Per-Page or Whole Document: Crop only the cover page, or apply the same crop box across every page in one click.

  • Lossless Crop: Changes the CropBox metadata rather than rasterising — text remains selectable, images keep full resolution.

  • Works on Scanned PDFs Too: Trim the dead borders left by sheet-fed scanners without rerunning OCR or losing layers.

  • Free, No Watermark: Output is clean and unbranded with no signup, no daily limit, and no hidden upsell.

How to use

  1. Drop your PDF onto the upload area or click to browse — a preview of page 1 appears immediately.
  2. If you want to crop a different page, change the page-number input to load that one in the preview.
  3. Drag a rectangle on the preview to mark exactly the area you want to keep — the shaded region is what stays.
  4. Pick whether to apply the crop to this page only or to every page in the document.
  5. Click 'Crop PDF' — pdf-lib rewrites the CropBox of each selected page to your selection.
  6. Download the cropped PDF — text stays selectable, no rasterisation, no quality loss.

When it helps

  • When a PDF export from Word or Google Docs has huge unused white margins that make the content hard to read on a tablet.
  • When you need to extract a single chart, table, or diagram from a research paper for a slide deck.
  • When a sheet-fed scanner left ugly grey or black borders around scanned contract pages.
  • When you want to remove the visible URL/timestamp band that some browsers print at the bottom of saved web pages.
  • When you need to fit a wide landscape PDF into a portrait Kindle or Boox e-reader frame.
  • When you are preparing a print run and need to crop bleed marks from a press-ready proof.

Examples

Trim margins of a Word export

Input

report.pdf — A4 with 4cm white margins all around

Expected result

report-cropped.pdf — same content centred in a 16×24cm trimmed page, every page in document

Isolate a chart for a slide

Input

research.pdf, page 7 only, drag a box around figure 3

Expected result

research-cropped.pdf — single page containing just the chart, ready to drop into PowerPoint

Clean a scanner edge

Input

scan.pdf — A4 with 1cm grey border on left side from sheet feeder

Expected result

scan-cropped.pdf — same scan with the dead band removed, all pages

Tips

  • Crop is non-destructive in PDF terms — the underlying content is still there. Use a tool like pdf-lib's MediaBox to fully discard the cropped-out content if you need a hard cut.
  • If your PDF has rotated pages, the visible top of the preview matches the rendered page, so just drag what you see — the tool maps coordinates correctly.
  • For multi-page books, applying 'all pages' keeps headers and footers consistent across the document.
  • Combine with PDF Resize Page Size after cropping to standardise the output to A4 or US Letter.
  • Save a screenshot of your crop selection if you may need to redo it later — selections are not stored between sessions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does cropping reduce file size?
Not significantly. Cropping rewrites the CropBox so the viewer hides the trimmed area, but the underlying content stream still exists in the file. To shrink the actual byte size, run the cropped PDF through PDF Compress afterwards.
Can I crop different shapes for different pages?
This tool applies one crop rectangle either to the current page or uniformly to all pages. For per-page custom rectangles, repeat the workflow once per page using the 'this page only' option.
Is the cropped-out content really gone?
Visually yes — the viewer respects the new CropBox — but the original content remains hidden in the file. Treat this as a visual trim, not a redaction. For permanent removal of sensitive content, use the PDF Redact Text tool.
Will this break text searchability?
No. CropBox edits do not touch the text layer, so search, copy, and accessibility readers all keep working on the cropped output.
Does it work on rotated pages?
Yes. The preview shows the page in its rendered orientation, so dragging the keep-area on what you see produces a correct CropBox even if the source page has a rotation tag.
Maximum file size?
Limited by your device memory rather than a server cap. PDFs up to ~50 MB and a few hundred pages render comfortably on a modern laptop.
Can I crop encrypted PDFs?
Password-protected PDFs need to be unlocked first using the PDF Unlock tool. Once decrypted, this cropper handles them like any other file.
Why do I see the same content size after cropping?
Most viewers show file size based on bytes, not visible area. Run the output through the PDF Compress tool if file size shrinkage is the goal.

Explore the category

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Glossary

CropBox
A PDF page boundary that defines the visible area when the page is rendered or printed; cropping changes this box without removing underlying content.
MediaBox
The largest page boundary in a PDF, representing the actual physical size of the page; CropBox sits inside MediaBox.
PDF Point
The unit PDFs use for measurement — 1 point equals 1/72 inch, so an A4 page is 595 × 842 points.
Rasterisation
Converting vector content (text, lines) into pixel images; this PDF cropper avoids rasterisation entirely to keep text selectable.
pdf.js
Mozilla's JavaScript PDF parser and renderer — the engine that draws the live preview in this tool.
pdf-lib
A pure-JS library for creating and modifying PDF files in the browser — it rewrites the CropBox here.