How to crop or trim a PDF’s margins

Published October 28, 2026 by Jason Nel

Wide white margins make a PDF hard to read on a phone or e-reader, scans often come with dark edges, and sometimes you only want one chart from a page. Cropping, also called trimming, cuts the page down to the part you want to keep.

How to crop a PDF step by step

Open Crop PDF and choose your PDF. It’s processed in your browser and isn’t uploaded.
Drag the crop box, or its corner and edge handles, on the page preview so it covers only what you want to keep.
For exact results, type the margins as percentages in the Top, Bottom, Left and Right boxes. The new page size is shown as you go.
Choose where to apply it: All pages, the Current page, or Some pages (for example 2-5, 8).
Click Crop PDF and download the result.

Trimming a whole document

To trim a scanned book or a set of slides exported with wide borders, set the box once and apply it to all pages. Margins are worked out as a percentage of each page, so the same crop fits pages of different sizes. If the odd page is laid out differently, such as a landscape table, crop it separately with Some pages.

Does cropping lower the quality?

No. Cropping sets a new visible area for each page; nothing is redrawn or recompressed. Text inside the crop stays sharp, selectable and searchable.

Cropping isn’t the same as deleting

Content outside the crop box is hidden from view in every PDF reader, but it can stay inside the file, and some editing programs can show it again. That’s fine for tidying margins. If you’re cutting off something confidential, such as an account number or a name in the header, use Redact PDF instead, which removes it for good.

Related jobs

Pages the wrong way round: fix them with Rotate PDF before cropping, so the box lines up with the page as you read it.
Unwanted whole pages: drop them with Remove pages.
Just one part of a page as an image: crop to it, then save the page with PDF to PNG.