How to Crop a PDF and Trim Its Margins
By the Datatool360 team ·
Scans come with wide borders, slides come with empty space, and some documents have a header you do not want to print. Cropping fixes this without retyping or rescanning anything. Here is how it works, and the one thing about it that surprises many people.
Crop a PDF step by step
- Open the Crop PDF tool and add your PDF. The first page appears with a red frame around it.
- Drag the edges or the corners of the frame inwards, until only the part you want to keep is inside. Everything outside the frame is darkened. Drag inside the frame to move it as a whole.
- Go to other pages with the arrows or by typing the page number. Use the zoom buttons when you need to be exact.
- Tick Apply to all pages to use the same frame everywhere. If you leave it unticked, only the pages where you drew a frame are cropped, and each one by its own frame.
- Press Crop & Download.
The file is changed in your browser and not uploaded.
The surprise: cropped is not deleted
A normal crop tells the PDF viewer which part of the page to show. The page looks smaller and cleaner, but the rest of the page is still inside the file, only hidden. Somebody with the right tool can show it again.
This matters when you crop something out for a reason: a name, an address, a number, a signature. For this case, tick Flattening Crop. The kept part of each cropped page is then turned into a picture and the cut-away part is gone for good. You pay for it in two ways: the text on those pages can no longer be selected or searched, and the file can get bigger.
If you only want tidier margins on a page, a normal crop is the better choice: the text stays real text and the file stays small.
Cropping many pages
Apply to all pages is the quick way to remove the same border everywhere, for example the white frame around a scanned book. Draw the frame on one page, tick the box and download. The frame is stored as a share of each page, so pages of different sizes are cut in the same proportion. If the pages are not the same, check a few of them first.
If every page needs its own frame, leave the box unticked and draw a frame on each page. Pages without a frame stay as they were.
Using the keyboard
You do not need a mouse. Tab moves through the frame and its eight handles, and each one has a name that a screen reader reads out. With a handle selected, the arrow keys move that edge by one percent of the page, and Shift with an arrow moves it by five percent. With the whole frame selected, the arrow keys move the frame.
Good to know
- The frame is always as you see the page. Pages that are rotated are cropped the way they look on screen.
- The tool shows the size of what you keep, in points (72 points are one inch), under the page.
- Reset puts the frame of the current page back to the full page.
- A password protected file cannot be cropped as it is. Unlock it first with the Lock & Unlock PDF tool, then crop the unlocked copy.
- After cropping, the file may need less space if you also run it through Compress PDF.
Keep reading
- How to Compress a PDF and Reduce Its File SizeHow to make a PDF smaller: what makes PDFs big, how the levels and the target size work, what you lose, and what to do when a file will not shrink.
- How to Split a PDF Into Pages or Smaller FilesHow to split a PDF into smaller files: keep a page range, odd or even pages, single pages, equal parts or chapters, and how the results are downloaded.