Crop PDF Pages
Trim margins from all pages in a PDF with custom millimetre settings. Runs entirely in your browser — no upload required.
What Does Cropping a PDF Do?
Cropping a PDF reduces the visible area of each page by adjusting the crop box — a PDF standard rectangle that defines what readers display. Unlike deleting content, cropping only hides the trimmed area; the underlying data remains in the file. This is particularly useful for removing oversized white margins added by printers or scanners, cutting away watermarks in the margin area, or reducing the page footprint of a document before embedding it in a presentation.
Cropping is also used by document designers who need consistent margin sizes across a batch of pages. For example, if you have 50 scanned pages each with slightly different white borders, a uniform crop trims them all to the same dimensions in seconds.
How to Crop a PDF — Step by Step
- Open the Crop PDF tool at pdfforge.cc/crop-pdf.
- Drop your PDF into the upload area or click to browse for the file.
- Enter the amount to trim from each side in millimetres — Top, Bottom, Left and Right can all be set independently.
- Click Crop PDF. The cropped file downloads to your device instantly.
Typical Cropping Values for Common Use Cases
- Remove scanner borders — Scanners often add a black or white border of 5–10 mm. Enter 8 mm on all four sides to eliminate this cleanly.
- Standardise margins — If a document has a 30 mm top margin but you need 20 mm, enter 10 mm for the Top field only.
- Trim to content area — If you need only the central text block, measure the margin in the PDF viewer (most show page coordinates on hover) and enter those values.
- Landscape to portrait — Crop aggressively from top and bottom to convert a landscape-formatted page to portrait proportions for printing.
Does Cropping Reduce File Size?
In most cases, cropping a PDF does not significantly reduce the file size. The crop box is a display instruction — the content data (images, fonts, vector graphics) outside the crop boundary is still stored in the file, just hidden from viewers. If you want to reduce file size, use the Compress PDF tool after cropping, or use the Split PDF tool to extract only the pages you need. That said, removing large image-heavy margins through cropping can occasionally reduce the rendered canvas size, which may improve performance on some PDF viewers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I crop only some pages, not all pages?
Yes. The full PDFForge app allows you to specify a page range to crop — for example, just pages 1, 3 and 5, or a range like 2–10. Pages outside the range are left unchanged in the output file.
Will cropping affect the text or images inside the page?
No. Cropping only adjusts the visible rectangle around the page. Content inside the visible area is completely untouched. All fonts, images and vector graphics retain their original quality and positioning.
Can I undo a crop?
Technically yes — since cropping only hides content rather than deleting it, a PDF editor can restore the original crop box. However, if you downloaded a cropped file, you would need to re-process your original PDF. Always keep a copy of the original document before cropping.
What units does the crop tool use?
The PDFForge crop tool accepts millimetre values for maximum precision and universality. Internally, PDFs use points (1/72 inch), so the entered millimetre values are converted automatically when the file is written.
Will the cropped PDF look different on all PDF viewers?
Yes — in a good way. The crop box is a standard PDF feature and all modern PDF viewers (Adobe Acrobat, Preview on macOS, Chrome, Edge, mobile PDF apps) honour it and display only the cropped area.