How to Crop a PDF
To crop a PDF, draw a box around the part of the page you want to keep and apply it. The free PDF cropper on PDFDEN lets you drag that box on a page preview or type exact margins. It sets both page boxes, so every PDF viewer shows the cropped area.
Crop PDF: Trim the margins off PDF pages. Free, and your file never leaves your device.
Open Crop PDFSteps
Open Crop PDF and drop in your PDF.
Drag a crop box on the page preview. For precise results, enter the margins as numbers instead.
Choose whether the crop applies to all pages or only the current one.
Apply the crop and download the new PDF.
Crop one page or every page
Applying the crop to all pages suits documents with a consistent layout, like scans with a wide border or slides exported with a blank frame.
Pages with different layouts need separate treatment. Crop the current page, move to the next one and set a new box. Enter margins as numbers when several pages should match exactly.
Check a few pages in the preview before you apply the box to the whole file. A crop that fits page one can clip a wide table or a page number further in.
Cropping hides content, it does not delete it
Cropping changes what the page shows, not what the file contains. Text and images outside the crop box are still inside the PDF, and some editors can reveal them again.
That is fine for trimming margins. It is not a way to remove private information. To get rid of names, numbers or signatures for good, use Redact PDF, which burns the boxes into the page. The guide on how to redact a PDF explains the difference.
Crop PDF: Trim the margins off PDF pages. Free, and your file never leaves your device.
Open Crop PDFHow to crop a PDF on a Mac with Preview
Preview can crop. Open the PDF, choose Tools > Rectangular Selection, drag a box over the area to keep, then choose Tools > Crop. Preview crops the current page. To crop several, select them in the thumbnail sidebar first.
Preview's crop also hides rather than removes the content outside the box. Windows has no built-in PDF cropper, so a browser tool like the free PDF crop tool is the easiest option there.
Crop, resize or fit more on a page?
Cropping makes the page smaller by cutting its edges. If you want a standard size like A4 or Letter with all content kept, use Resize PDF, which scales the content to fit. And to print small pages without waste, Multiple Pages Per Sheet places 2, 4 or more pages on each sheet.
These can be combined. A common sequence for printing scanned book pages: crop the dark scanner edges, resize to Letter, then put two pages on each sheet to save paper.
Troubleshooting a cropped PDF
The crop looks wrong in another app. Some tools only set the CropBox, which some viewers ignore. PDFDEN sets the MediaBox too, so the cropped area is what every viewer shows.
Text got cut off. The box was too tight. Crop the original again with slightly larger margins. Keep the original file until you are happy with the result.
The file did not get smaller. Cropping hides content but does not remove it, so the size stays about the same. To shrink the file, run it through Compress PDF after cropping with the PDF crop tool.