Crop PDF pages
Trim the edges by dragging or by typing exact numbers — and decide whether what you cut is hidden or gone. Runs in your browser, no upload, no account.
Runs in your browser 0 bytes uploadedDrop the PDF you need to crop
Nothing is uploaded. The page is redrawn here, in this tab, out of bytes that never leave it.
Crop PDF edges, and know which of the two things you just did
Almost every tool in this category uses one word for two very different outcomes, and the difference is the only thing on this page worth memorizing. A PDF stores, alongside each sheet, a small rectangle that tells a viewer which portion to display. Adjust that rectangle and the sheet appears trimmed everywhere: on screen, in print, in a thumbnail. The drawing instructions underneath are not consulted and not altered. Everything you appeared to cut away is still recorded in the file, and restoring that one rectangle brings all of it back.
It is worse than merely recoverable, and this is measurable rather than theoretical. Point a text extractor at a trimmed file and the words from the discarded strip come out immediately — no restoration step, no special software, nothing you would call a technique. We tested exactly that against our own output using an unrelated open-source extractor: a US Letter sheet with wording placed in all four borders, trimmed an inch on every side, returned every one of those four strings. So did a sheet where the wording sat outside a genuine clipping path, which is the clever-sounding alternative people reach for next. Clipping paths and display rectangles are the same kind of promise: they govern what gets drawn, never what is stored.
Which is why this page asks you to pick, and labels both choices for what they are. Trim adjusts the rectangle: every sheet keeps its selectable words, its embedded typefaces, its links and its form fields, the file does not swell, and the job finishes in the time it takes to rewrite a few numbers — with the discarded strip still sitting in the file. Trim and delete redraws the retained area as pixels and writes that as the sheet, so the strip is genuinely unrecoverable. Neither is the correct answer in general. Fixing the borders on a slide handout is the first; sending a supplier a quotation whose margin still carries your internal reference number is emphatically the second.
PDF, in brief
| Full name | Portable Document Format |
|---|---|
| Extension |
.pdf
|
| Format type | Fixed-layout document |
| MIME type |
application/pdf
|
What the delete option costs, quoted before you press it
Redrawing a sheet as pixels destroys its word layer. Nothing on it can be highlighted or found with a search, assistive software reads nothing there, and any link or comment sitting inside the retained area stops responding to a click. Weight normally climbs as well: a photograph of a sheet occupies more room than the recipe for drawing one. That is a genuine loss and it is stated above the button, never discovered in the download.
How much heavier deserves a measured figure rather than a shrug. Our own four-sheet test document weighs 4,134 bytes; trimming it adds 110 of them, because four numbers per sheet is all that changes. Deleting instead rebuilds three of those four sheets and lands at 86,593 bytes at 150 DPI, 119,319 at 200 and 200,596 at 300 — twenty-one, twenty-nine and forty-nine times the original. A sheet of type is the harshest case for that ratio, since type compresses beautifully as instructions and badly as pixels, so a scan starts heavy and barely grows at all. 200 DPI is the default because moving up from 150 costs thirty-eight per cent more bytes and no measurable time, while moving on to 300 costs another sixty-eight per cent and doubles the work.
Two things keep the loss narrow. First, the sheets that suffer it are the sheets that require it: before anything is written, each selected sheet is drawn at a coarse resolution and examined to see whether any ink at all lies beyond your chosen boundary. Sheets where nothing does are passed through with their word layer whole. A forty-sheet report whose running headers appear on nine of them reports nine of forty, not forty, and that count appears while you are still deciding. Second, the examination looks at ink rather than wording, which matters more than it sounds: a logotype, a printer's rule or the gray edge of a scan carries no characters at all, and a check built on characters would have declared such a sheet clean and left the logotype inside the delivered file.
While the boundary is still being adjusted, the wording that falls beyond it is counted and the first piece of it is quoted straight back at you — fourteen runs of text fall outside, beginning with “Internal use only, rev 3”. A figure alone has to be taken on faith. A figure with a quotation beside it can be checked against the sheet in front of you, which is the difference between a warning and a fact.
Boundaries by dragging, or by typing exact numbers
Drag across the sheet and the four numbers change; type into one of them and the frame moves. They are one setting with two controls, not two competing modes where you have to work out which one is currently winning. Units can be inches, millimeters or points, and the starting unit follows the paper rather than your preference: US sizes open in inches, ISO sizes in millimeters, because 8.27 by 11.69 inches tells nobody on earth that they are looking at an A4. Negative figures are declined deliberately. Widening a sheet to make room for a hole punch is a different operation — the sheet boundary has to grow and the artwork has to shift inside it — and a field that swallowed minus twenty would be advertising something this page does not perform.
The setting is stored as four distances from four borders, not as one rectangle, and that choice is what makes a mixed document behave honestly. A rectangle expressed in absolute units means one thing on an A4 sheet and something else on an A3 one, so any tool that applies the same rectangle to both is misrepresenting one of them without saying so. Half an inch off each border means precisely the same thing on every sheet in the file, whatever sizes it happens to contain — and on sheets stored sideways, top and bottom refer to the orientation you are looking at rather than the one recorded internally, which is the mismatch that otherwise deposits a boundary somewhere unrelated while the file still opens without complaint.
There is also a button that measures the ink and proposes the four numbers for you, which distinguishes two situations that feel identical. Scanners and export filters habitually emit a sheet larger than the marks on it. But a white band can equally be painted onto the sheet as artwork, and no boundary adjustment will ever shift that. If the measurement reports nothing to remove while you can plainly see white borders, you have learned which of the two you are dealing with.
Checking that the boundary landed where you dragged it
A file that opens, with the right number of sheets and plausible dimensions, tells you nothing whatsoever about position. So the finished file is reopened and compared against your own selection, along a route that deliberately never consults the frame drawn on your screen. The original sheet is drawn to pixels and your selected region is lifted out of those pixels; the delivered sheet is drawn separately; the two are then sampled point by point and scored. Only the second of those routes passes through the coordinate conversion, so a mistake in that conversion cannot quietly cancel itself out in both. The reason for that caution is recorded: a sibling page here measured twelve of thirteen checks passing while its vertical axis was intentionally reversed, because the overlay being inspected was reversed to match.
The same read-back reports the rest in figures. In delete mode: characters remaining on the redrawn sheets, which must be none, characters surviving on the sheets that needed no redrawing, which proves they were left alone, and a hunt through the whole delivered file for the wording you discarded. In trim mode that hunt normally succeeds, and saying so out loud is the point — the report names what can still be pulled out of the file you are about to send, rather than letting the word crop imply a guarantee it never made.
What your own computer already does, and where that runs out
Some machines need none of this. macOS ships with Preview, which trims a document with a selection and a keystroke and asks nobody's permission; a paid Acrobat license does the same on Windows, and both are perfectly good answers if you have them. Neither is available to a Chromebook, to Linux, to Android, to an iPhone, or to the very common office laptop where software installation belongs to a department three floors away. Those machines have exactly one route, and until now that route meant handing the document to a stranger's server. If you were sent here by a search that produced upload-first services, two of them have their own examination on this site: iLovePDF and Smallpdf both do what they say and both begin by taking possession of your file, which is a separate question from whether they are trustworthy.
When something else is the right tool
Removing a single name from the middle of a paragraph is not this operation, and the distinction survives the fact that both operations can genuinely delete. Here, deletion applies to everything beyond a boundary — sensible for borders, scanner edges and a presentation exported inside a black surround. A name buried in running prose is a shape you point at, with material you need on all sides of it, and that belongs on redact a PDF, which rebuilds only the marked region and reports the characters it consumed. Reach for it whenever the thing to remove is encircled by things to keep.
When the material to lose occupies whole sheets, neither tool is the efficient choice. Handing over three sheets cannot expose the other thirty-seven, however thoroughly those thirty-seven were treated, and nothing needs auditing afterwards: splitting a PDF pulls out a range, and deleting pages from a PDF discards the ones you point at. Putting the survivors back into one document afterwards is merging PDF files. And nothing here reads a scan: a scanned sheet has no characters to count, so the wording report is empty on it, while the ink measurement and the delete option work on it exactly as they do on anything else.
Questions
Does cropping actually remove what I cut off?
Not by itself, and that is the single most useful thing to know about the format. A crop writes a box into the page dictionary that tells a viewer which part to draw; the page description underneath is untouched, so the words in the margin are still in the file. Anyone who sets that box back gets the whole page returned, and a text extractor does not even need to bother — point one at a cropped file and the cropped-away lines come straight out. That is why this page offers a second mode which redraws the kept area as an image, so the rest is genuinely deleted, and why it tells you which of the two you picked instead of letting the word "crop" imply the stronger one.
What does the delete mode cost me?
The text layer on the pages it has to flatten. A page redrawn as an image cannot be selected, searched or read aloud, links and annotations inside the kept area stop being clickable, and the file usually grows since a photograph of a sheet takes more room than the recipe for drawing one. Two things soften it. Only pages that actually carry something outside the crop are flattened, so a document whose margins are empty on most pages keeps its text there, and the count is stated before you run anything rather than discovered afterwards. The real size is measured on the finished file and shown next to the original, never estimated.
Can I type exact margins instead of dragging?
Yes, and the two are the same setting rather than two modes. Drag an edge and the numbers move; type a number and the frame moves. You can work in inches, millimeters or points, and the unit starts out matching the paper — inches for US sizes, millimeters for ISO sizes, because 8.27 by 11.69 inches tells nobody that they are holding an A4. Negative numbers are refused on purpose: adding space around a page is a different operation, not a crop with the sign flipped, and a field that accepted minus twenty would promise something this tool does not do.
What happens to pages that are rotated or a different size?
Both are handled, and both are stated on the page before you choose anything. A rotated page has a display orientation that is not the coordinate system stored in the file, which is the mistake that puts a crop somewhere entirely different while the file still opens perfectly; the margins you set are read in the orientation you are looking at and converted once. Pages of differing size are the other case, and it is why the crop is stored as margins from each edge rather than as one rectangle. One rectangle in points means different things on an A4 and an A3, so a tool that applies it to both is quietly lying about one of them. Trimming an inch off every edge means the same thing on every page.
How do I know the crop landed where I dragged it?
The finished file is read back and compared with what you selected, and the comparison deliberately avoids looking at the box drawn on screen. The source page is rendered and the region you dragged is cut out of those pixels; the output page is rendered separately; the two images are then sampled and matched. Only the second of those paths goes through the coordinate conversion, so an error in that conversion cannot cancel itself out in both. That failure is not hypothetical: a sibling tool measured twelve of thirteen checks passing with its vertical flip deliberately broken, because the overlay it was reading was flipped the same way.
How large a document can this handle?
Nothing is turned away for being big, and the two modes sit at opposite ends of the cost scale. Trimming rewrites four numbers per sheet, so a nine-hundred-sheet catalog finishes about as fast as a one-sheet invoice; weight and length barely enter into it. Deleting is the mode with an appetite, since every affected sheet is drawn at your chosen resolution and each drawing wants roughly four bytes per pixel while it exists — a US Letter sheet at 300 DPI is eight and a half million of them. Whatever you hand over, the note you get first describes what the tab is being asked for, and then the work starts anyway: the hardware answers to you, not to us. Halving the resolution quarters that appetite, and running the range in two goes halves it again.
Why does my PDF have white margins that will not go away?
Because the visible white and the page boundary are two different things, and only one of them is the crop box. Scanners and export filters routinely write a page that is larger than the ink on it, sometimes because the original was a smaller sheet on a larger platen, sometimes because a print-ready file carries bleed. Cropping fixes the boundary and does nothing about a white rectangle that is actually drawn onto the page as content, which is the case that confuses people most often. The crop-to-content button measures the ink rather than the geometry, so it tells the two situations apart: if it finds nothing to trim, the white you are looking at is drawn, not empty.
I need one name gone from the middle of a page. Is this the right tool?
No, and the distinction is worth stating clearly because both tools delete. Cropping removes everything outside a rectangle, which is the right operation for margins, scanner borders and a slide deck exported with a black frame. Removing a passage in the middle of a paragraph is a rectangle you point at, not everything outside one, and that lives on the redaction page. Reach for that one whenever the thing you want gone is surrounded by things you want kept.