Crop PDF

Draw a box on the page to keep just what’s inside it: a chart from a report, a label to print, a receipt from a scan. The same box crops every page it applies to, so pages of the same layout come out the same size. Drag the box or its handles to adjust it, or use the arrow keys.

Trim margins works page by page instead: each page is cut to what it actually shows, with a narrow margin, a quarter inch or half an inch round it. Pages of different layouts each lose only their own white edges, and a blank page keeps its size.

Crop all pages, only the odd or even ones (handy for two-sided scans, whose margins swap sides), or type the pages, like 1-3, 8.

A PDF page has a crop box: the part a viewer shows and a printer prints. Cropping sets it, so every app shows the page cut down, and what’s outside the box is still in the file. Someone with an editor can bring it back, and its text can still be found by search tools.

To take content out of a PDF for good, such as an account number or a name, use Redact PDF: it removes the text, pictures and drawings under each box before it saves.

By default only the crop box changes. Turn on “Change the page size too” and the page itself becomes the new size as well, for editors and print tools that ignore the crop box.

Cropping only changes each page’s box. Text stays text you can select and search, and photos keep every pixel, because nothing on the page is redrawn or compressed again.

Pages stored on their side crop by what you see, so the corner you drew stays the corner. Bookmarks, links, form fields and the document’s title are kept.

Several PDFs can be cropped at once: each saves as a copy named after it, like report-cropped.pdf. To join them into one file, add them to Merge PDF.