Margins are in PDF points (1 pt = 1/72 inch). Applied to every page.
How it works
The PDF Crop tool trims margin space from every page of a PDF by adjusting each page's MediaBox coordinates — the same technique professional prepress workflows use to remove bleed marks, crop marks, and excess whitespace after a document is finalized. No rasterization occurs: the crop is a pure vector operation, meaning text, fonts, and vector graphics remain fully sharp at any zoom level.
When you need PDF cropping: a scanned document has wide scanner margins that waste screen space in a PDF viewer. A LaTeX-generated document has excessive whitespace from the default geometry settings. A report exported from Excel or Google Sheets has large default margins that you want to reduce for a more compact print layout. A multi-page PDF needs consistent trimming on all pages to fit a specific paper format.
How to use it: 1. Upload your PDF. 2. Enter margin offsets in PDF points (1 pt = 1/72 inch). Top, right, bottom, and left are independent. 3. Click Crop PDF. The tool applies the same trim to every page and downloads the result.
Common point values: - 18 pt = 0.25 inch (minimal trim for clean borders) - 36 pt = 0.5 inch (standard half-inch margin removal) - 72 pt = 1 inch (aggressive trim for oversized scanner margins)
Important: the crop adjusts the visible area of the page, not the content. Content in the trimmed margin is hidden but still present in the PDF data — this is standard PDF cropping behavior and is not a redaction method. Use the PDF Redact tool to permanently obscure content.
Privacy: all cropping runs in the browser using pdf-lib. Your file is never uploaded to any server.
Frequently Asked Questions
- No — cropping adjusts the MediaBox (the visible area) without deleting the underlying content. Data in the trimmed margins is hidden but still present in the file. This is standard PDF cropping behavior. If you need to permanently remove content rather than just hide it, use the PDF Redact tool to draw black rectangles over the area and then flatten the document.
- PDF points. One point is 1/72 of an inch. Common conversions: 72 pt = 1 inch, 36 pt = 0.5 inch, 28 pt ≈ 1 cm, 56 pt ≈ 2 cm. A US Letter page is 612 × 792 pt. If you're trimming scanner margins of about half an inch, enter 36 in each field.
- Not with this tool — the same margin values are applied uniformly to every page. If you need different crop amounts per page, you would need to extract each page individually using the PDF Page Extractor, crop each one separately, and then merge the results with the PDF Merge tool.
- Some PDF viewers display the full page including cropped margins (they show the CropBox or MediaBox at the viewer's default zoom). The crop takes effect correctly in other contexts — print dialogs, PDF-to-image conversion, and page preview tools. Adobe Reader and most modern viewers honor the MediaBox and display the cropped area only.