The short answer
Drop the PDF on the tool below. The first page appears with a frame around it. Drag the frame or its handles to the area you want to keep, or type the margins in millimeters. Under Apply to, choose All pages, Odd pages, Even pages or This page, then press Crop PDF and download the result. To trim white space without measuring, tick Trim white margins automatically and set how much margin to keep.
To change the page size instead, choose Change page size at the top, pick A4, Letter, Legal, A5, A3 or Custom, decide whether the content should be scaled to fit or keep its size, and press Resize pages.
Try it here: Crop PDF
Open the full tool pageGood reasons to crop
In all of these cases the goal is to change what is visible, not to change the content itself. Cropping in this tool never converts pages to images, so text stays sharp at any zoom and can still be selected and searched.
- Scanned books and articles: remove the dark scanner border and the wide empty margins so text is larger on a phone or e-reader.
- Slides exported to PDF: cut away the notes column or the template frame.
- Printing two pages on one sheet: smaller margins mean larger text.
- Screenshots and receipts saved as PDF: keep only the part that matters.
- Documents with printer marks or bleed: crop to the finished page size.
Odd and even pages
Books are scanned in pairs. The binding is on the right of left pages and on the left of right pages, so the margins are mirrored and one frame does not fit both. Choose Odd pages, set the frame on page 1 and crop. Then open the downloaded file, choose Even pages, go to page 2 with the arrow buttons, set the frame and crop again.
The faster way for most scans is the automatic option. It draws every page small, finds the area that is not white and adds the margin you choose, page by page. It handles mirrored margins, different page sizes and pages where the text block sits higher or lower. Note that a dark scanner edge counts as content, so for scans with black borders the manual frame can work better.
What cropping really does
A PDF page has several boxes. The media box is the full sheet, and the crop box is the part that viewers show and printers print. Cropping sets these boxes to the area you chose. Nothing is redrawn and nothing is deleted: the parts outside the frame are hidden, but they are still in the file, and a PDF editor can make them visible again.
This is exactly what you want for margins and borders. It is not what you want for private information. If you need to remove a name, a signature or a number, use the Redact PDF tool, which really deletes the content. The file size also stays about the same after cropping, because the hidden parts remain; to make the file smaller, use the compressor.
| You want to | Use | Content outside is |
|---|---|---|
| Remove margins or borders | Crop PDF | Hidden, still in the file |
| Remove private details | Redact PDF | Deleted |
| Make the file smaller | Compress PDF | Not changed |
| Remove whole pages | Organize PDF or Remove blank pages | Deleted |
Changing the page size
Sometimes the problem is not the margin but the paper size. A portal may ask for A4 while the document is in Letter, or a booklet should be printed on A5. Choose Change page size and pick the target size. Scale to fit makes the content as large as possible on the new page without distortion, so a Letter page on A4 is reduced slightly and centered. Keep size leaves the content at its real size and centers it, which adds white margins on a larger page and hides the edges on a smaller one.
Orientation Auto gives landscape pages a landscape sheet and portrait pages a portrait sheet. Portrait or Landscape forces one orientation for all pages. A preview shows the current page on the new sheet with the scale in percent. Links and comments move together with the content, so they still sit on the right words.
Tips for a clean result
Use the arrow buttons to look at a few pages before you crop, especially the first page, a page with a wide table and the last page. With Trim white margins automatically, a margin of 3 to 5 millimeters looks natural; 0 can cut letters that touch the edge of the text block. If one page has a stray mark in the margin, the automatic option keeps it, so crop that page separately with This page.