✂ PDF300
Crop the margins off a PDF
Scans often carry wide white borders, and a page built for A4 wastes space on a phone screen. Draw the box you want to keep and the rest is trimmed away.
Open the toolRuns entirely in your browser. The file never leaves your device.
How it works
- Add the PDFDrop the file onto the page.
- Draw the boxDrag the crop area over the page. Apply it to one page or to all of them.
- DownloadSave the cropped file.
Questions
No. This tool runs in your browser with JavaScript, so the file never leaves your device. Once the page has loaded you can even go offline and it still works.
Neither. No account, no watermark on the output. The practical limit is your device memory — large scanned files use more of it.
Guide: cropping well
When you'd use this
Scanner software and photocopiers nearly always leave a wide white or grey border around the scanned area, because the glass bed is bigger than the page you put on it. A phone camera used as a scanner adds the same problem from a different cause — some of the desk or table ends up in the shot. Either way, the result is a page where the actual content sits in the middle of a lot of blank space. On a phone screen that blank space pushes the readable part smaller still, since the viewer is already zooming to fit a page meant for A4 or Letter.
Cropping is also useful on PDFs that were never scanned: a slide deck exported to PDF with wide margins on all sides, or a book page scanned two-up where you only want one side at a time (pair this with Split to separate the pages first).
Setting the margins
The tool asks for four numbers in millimetres — top, bottom, left and right — measured from each edge of the page inward. A typical scanned A4 page with a wide border might need 15–25 mm trimmed from each side; a book page photographed off-angle often needs different amounts on each edge, since one side of the page sits closer to the camera than the other. Preview the result before committing to all pages: if a document was scanned on inconsistent equipment, page 1 and page 40 may need different margins, and applying one setting to the whole file can clip content on pages that had a smaller border to begin with.
What cropping does not do
Cropping a PDF sets the page's CropBox — the region a viewer displays — rather than deleting anything. The original content streams for the whole page, including whatever sat in the margin you trimmed away, are still stored inside the file. For saving space or decluttering a page visually, this is exactly what you want. It is not a way to permanently delete something that happened to fall in the margin, such as a stray name or stamp — a PDF editor that ignores the CropBox, or a tool that reads the raw file, can still reveal it. If removing content for privacy is the goal, see the note on redacting instead, which has the same limitation in a different form and is addressed on that page.
More questions
A little, if there were large embedded images — but mostly no. The page data is still there; only the visible window onto it changes. Use Compress if the goal is a smaller file.
Not from the cropped file itself, since the original CropBox value is overwritten. Keep your original file until you are sure the result is right.
Yes, when applied to the whole document — the same four margins come off every page. For a document with inconsistent margins, crop in smaller batches with Split first.
Yes. If your pages started as phone photos, build the PDF with Image to PDF first, then crop the result.