Crop a PDF to the area you want
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Scanned documents often arrive with wide grey borders, a slanted edge, or a whole second page caught in frame. Cropping trims the page down to the part that matters, which also makes the file easier to read on a phone and cheaper to print. Drag the area you want to keep, choose whether it applies to one page or all of them, and the cropped PDF is produced in your browser — the document is never uploaded.
What cropping a PDF actually changes
Every PDF page carries two rectangles: a MediaBox, which is the physical sheet, and a CropBox, which is the region a reader shows. Cropping here sets the CropBox. That makes it fast and lossless — no page is re-rendered and no image is re-encoded, so text stays selectable and a scan keeps its original resolution. It also means the trimmed-off content is still in the file. That trade is the right one for margins and framing, and the wrong one for anything confidential, which is why the tool says so next to the button rather than in the small print.
Why scans need this most
A phone photograph or a flatbed scan of an A4 sheet almost never fills the page cleanly. You get a grey border where the lid did not close, a dark strip along the spine of a bound document, or a second sheet half in frame. Portals that cap upload size make this worse, because those borders are image data you are paying for in bytes. Cropping to the sheet first, then compressing, reliably produces a smaller file than compressing alone.
Cropping before printing
If you only need one region of a page — a table, a stamp, a passport page — cropping before printing stops the printer scaling the whole sheet down to fit. Set the area, apply it to the page you need, and print the result at full size. Check your print preview once: most readers honour the crop area, but a few older drivers ignore it and fall back to the full sheet.
Frequently asked questions
- Does cropping remove the content outside the area?
- No, and this is the important limitation. Cropping sets the region a reader displays; the content outside it is still present in the file and can be revealed by widening the area again. Use it for trimming margins, not for hiding a signature, an address or an account number.
- Can I crop every page at once?
- Yes. The crop you drag on the first page can be applied to every page in one go, which is what you usually want for a scan where each page has the same border.
- Will the file get smaller?
- Usually only slightly. Because the hidden content remains in the file, cropping mostly changes what is displayed rather than what is stored. To genuinely reduce size, run the result through the PDF compressor.
- Does it work on a scanned PDF?
- Yes — a scan is the main reason to use this. Cropping works on the page geometry, so it does not matter whether the page is text or a photograph of a page.
- Will printing respect the crop?
- Yes. Most readers and printers honour the crop area, so the trimmed page is what comes out. Some older print drivers fall back to the full page, so check the print preview if the margins matter.
- Can I crop a password-protected PDF?
- No. Changing the page geometry means opening the document for editing, which encryption prevents. Save an unlocked copy in your PDF reader first, then crop that.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. The page is rendered and the crop applied entirely in this page, so a contract or an ID scan never leaves your device.