What PDF cropping changes
Cropping sets the visible page boundary. It is useful for trimming scanner borders, removing excess margins or making a page frame consistent without rasterizing the PDF. Text and vector content inside the kept area remain vector content.
Content outside the crop box can remain in the PDF structure and may be recoverable or visible in another editor. Cropping is therefore not redaction, erasure or a way to remove confidential information. Use a reviewed redaction workflow when information must be permanently removed.
Draw and apply a crop area
Choose a PDF and enter the page you want to preview. Drag across the preview from one corner to the opposite corner; the bright rectangle is the area that will remain visible. Draw again to replace it.
Choose Current page to change only that page or All pages to reuse the same proportional rectangle on every page. All pages is practical for a consistently scanned stack, but inspect pages with different sizes or orientations because the same percentage can clip different content. Select Crop PDF and download the confirmed file.
Rotation and existing page boxes
The preview follows the PDF page rotation and its current visible crop box. The drawn rectangle is converted back to PDF coordinates before writing the output, so 90°, 180° and 270° page rotations are considered instead of treating the preview as an unrotated sheet.
For a page that is already cropped, the new area is selected within the currently visible page. Applying to all pages recalculates the proportional area for each page’s own visible box and rotation. It does not force every page to one physical paper size.
Examples and uses
If a scan has a 5% dark border on each side, draw a rectangle just inside that border and apply it to all pages after checking several representative pages. A report with one oversized foldout is safer with Current page so the normal pages are unchanged.
The downloaded PDF keeps uncropped pages when Current page is selected. Your original file is never modified. Open the new PDF in a second viewer and check the first, last, rotated and unusually sized pages before printing or sharing.
Limits and troubleshooting
The crop rectangle must have meaningful width and height. A very small accidental drag is rejected. Encrypted or damaged PDFs can fail, and unusual page boxes may appear differently in another viewer.
Cropping does not compress images, change paper size to A4 or Letter, remove annotations, flatten forms, repair scans or automatically detect white margins. It also does not delete content outside the box. Files are processed in this tab and are not uploaded by the tool.
Frequently asked questions
Can I undo the crop? Keep the original PDF; the tool creates a new download. Can I crop different pages differently in one run? This focused version applies one drawn rectangle to the current page or proportionally to all pages. Does it rotate pages? No, it respects existing rotation. Will file size shrink? Not necessarily, because hidden content can remain. Is this redaction? No—never use crop alone to remove secrets.