Scanned pages come with dark borders, exported reports with wide margins, and slides with unused white space. Cropping a PDF trims away the edges so that the useful content fills the page. This tool crops every page of a document by the same amount on each side, using measurements in points, with no software to install.

How to crop a PDF

1. Upload the PDF.
2. Enter the amount to remove in the four boxes: Top (pt), Bottom (pt), Left (pt) and Right (pt). Blank boxes count as zero.
3. Press Crop. A file named cropped.pdf downloads.
4. Open it and check the edges to confirm nothing important was cut away.

The same four values are applied to every page. Numbers are read as whole numbers, so a value of 14.6 is treated as 14.

Understanding points

A point is 1/72 of an inch, the standard unit inside PDF files. A standard A4 page is about 595 by 842 points, and a US Letter page is 612 by 792 points. Use these conversions to plan a crop:

Typical margins in documents range between 36 and 72 points, so trimming 30 to 50 points per side is a common way to remove empty borders without touching the text.

A worked example

You have a scan with a 1-centimetre black border on all sides. Enter 30 in every box, a little over 28, so the border is removed completely. An A4 page of 595 by 842 points becomes 535 by 782 points. If only the bottom has a scanner shadow, enter 30 in Bottom and leave the others at zero. To remove an unwanted header, put a larger value only in Top, such as 60.

How cropping works and what it leaves behind

Because the file itself is not shrunk by this process, cropping usually does not make a PDF smaller. If file size is your concern, use Compress PDF after cropping.

Common uses

• Removing scanner borders and shadows from digitised pages.
• Trimming the large margins from a PDF printed from a web page.
• Cutting an unnecessary header or footer.
• Focusing on a single region of a diagram for a presentation, using larger values on several sides.
• Making pages fill a small screen, such as an e-reader or phone, so the text is larger.

Cautions

1. Uniform cropping. Every page receives the same trim. If the content position varies between pages, a crop that suits one page can cut text on another. Check several pages, particularly those at the start and end.
2. Too much trimming. Values larger than the page can produce a blank or invalid page. Keep the total of top and bottom well below the page height, and left plus right below the width.
3. Different page sizes. In mixed-size documents, a fixed value takes a bigger share of a small page.
4. Printing. Printers often scale to fit the page, so a cropped page may print larger than before.
5. Rotated pages. Pages that are rotated can interpret top, bottom, left and right relative to the unrotated page, so test results on rotated scans.

Workflow suggestions

For a messy scan, first use Rotate PDF so the pages are upright, then crop, then Compress PDF if the size is a problem. For a document you will print, preview the result in the PDF Reader on this site to see the final edges at 200 percent.

Judging how much to trim

Open the file in the PDF Reader first and look at the widest margin on a typical page. Convert that margin to points using the table, then subtract about 5 millimetres, roughly 14 points, so that some white space remains around the text. A tight crop right against the letters looks cramped and risks cutting descenders or page numbers. Try the first run on a copy of the file, view the result at 200 percent, and adjust by 5 to 10 points at a time. Remember that a bigger top value removes content from the top edge only, so if a scan is slightly crooked, leave extra room on the side where the page tilts.

Privacy

All work is done inside your browser. The file is not uploaded.

Frequently asked questions