How to Crop a PDF

Cropping changes the visible area of a page. It is the fix for scanner shadows, oversized margins and pages that carry a strip of the next document down one side.

Crop a PDF

1. 1Open the Crop PDF tool and add your document.
2. 2Drag the crop boundary on the page preview.
3. 3Apply the same crop to every page, or crop individually where pages differ.
4. 4Check the result, then download.

What cropping actually does

A PDF page has several boxes, and cropping sets the CropBox — the region a reader displays. The content outside it is still in the file, untouched. Changing the CropBox back reveals it again.

When cropping is the right tool

• Removing the black or grey border a scanner adds around a page.
• Trimming excessive white margins so a document reads better on a phone.
• Cutting a page down to a single chart or table for reuse.
• Removing a strip of an adjacent page captured in a book scan.
• Standardising a mixed batch to a consistent visible size.

Cropping for phone reading

A4 pages with generous margins are unpleasant on a phone, because the text column ends up small. Cropping the margins away can increase the effective text size by a third without changing the document at all — one of the more satisfying small improvements you can make to a document you have to read on the move.

Pages that are not all the same

A single crop applied to a mixed document will cut into some pages and leave borders on others. Where pages differ — a landscape chart among portrait text, or a scan where the paper moved — crop those pages individually. It is slower and it is the only way to get a clean result.

Printing a cropped document

A cropped page prints at its cropped size, which may not match the paper. Scale to fit in the print dialogue, or expect a smaller image centred on the sheet.