How to Crop a PDF Online and Trim Page Margins

Add your file to PDF Crop, then define the pages to process and the rectangle you want to keep. Leaving the page field empty crops the whole document with the same values, while a range such as 1-3 limits the operation to those pages.

Download the result and zoom into the first page to confirm nothing was cut off. If text was clipped, go back to the original file and try a larger area. Cropping an already cropped file is not the same operation, because the values are then measured against the new, smaller page.

The crop area is expressed as a proportion of the page rather than in millimetres, so the same values work for A4, Letter and unusual page sizes. Left and Top mark where the rectangle starts, Width and Height describe its size, and the origin is the top-left corner of the page.

The default 0.05 / 0.05 / 0.9 / 0.9 removes roughly five percent from each edge. To drop only a header band, use Left 0, Width 1, Top 0.12 and Height 0.88. To keep the right half of a page, use Left 0.5 and Width 0.5. Left plus Width, and Top plus Height, must not exceed 1, otherwise the rectangle falls outside the page.

Only the pages you select are redrawn at the smaller size; the rest are copied unchanged. That means one document can end up holding two different page sizes, which is harmless on screen but can print at inconsistent scales.

If the layout is uniform, crop every page in one pass. When different sections have different margins, split the document, crop each part with its own values and merge the results back together for a consistent final file.

Cropping does not meaningfully reduce file size. If you need to get under an upload limit, use PDF Compress instead; cropping changes what is shown, not how the content is stored.

The cropped area sits outside the new page and is neither displayed nor printed. Even so, do not rely on cropping to hide confidential data such as account numbers or signatures; use permanent redaction for that. Because the page is not rasterised, the remaining text stays selectable and searchable.