Open a document above, then either drag the crop on the page or type the four margins. They are millimetres by default, and centimetres, inches and points are one click away — because a crop on a print file is a length, not a number of screen pixels.
Nothing is uploaded. The document is opened, changed and saved inside your browser.
What cropping a PDF actually does
Worth knowing before you send the file anywhere, because almost every tool that does this stays quiet about it.
A PDF page carries two rectangles that matter here. The media box is the sheet. The crop box is the part of that sheet a viewer shows and a printer prints. Cropping sets the crop box — and the artwork outside it is hidden, not deleted. It is still in the file, and any PDF tool can bring it back.
That is the right behaviour for a print job: nothing is destroyed, the cut is reversible, and the text stays text. It is the wrong behaviour if what you are trying to do is remove something from the file — a price, a name, an old address. For that, cropping is not enough, on this site or anywhere else. Take the item out in the program that made the document, or export a version that never had it.
There is one option here that goes further: Also change the page size itself. It sets the media box as well, so a print system that reads the sheet rather than the crop agrees with what you see. The artwork outside is still in the file; what is gone is the original page size.
Crop to the trim box
This is the part no general PDF tool offers, and the reason this page exists.
A file prepared for print states where it is meant to be cut — the trim box — and often how far the ink runs past that cut, the bleed box. When your document declares them, they appear as buttons: one click crops to the trim, or to the bleed.
And the check that goes with it: if your crop cuts inside a declared trim box, you are told, and by how much. That is a crop which loses part of the finished piece, and it is invisible until somebody at the press has already cut the job.
If the document declares neither box — most office PDFs do not — the page says so instead of pretending. An absent trim box is a fact about the file, not a number to invent.
How to crop a PDF
- Drop the document on the panel above, or choose it from your disk.
- Drag a rectangle on the page, or type the top, right, bottom and left margins.
- Choose whether the crop applies to every page, this page, or a range like
1-3, 5. - Press Crop and download. The file that comes back is your own document with a new crop box.
The number under the boxes is the page you will end up with, in the unit you are working in. It updates as you type.
Every page, one page, or a range
Set it once and it applies to every page you name — and each page is cropped against its own size and rotation. A cover that is landscape and a body that is portrait both lose 10 mm off the top when you ask for 10 mm off the top, which is not true of tools that copy one rectangle across a document.
The same holds for the trim box: crop to the trim across a document and each page is cropped to its own declared trim. A page that declares none falls back to the margins you can see.
Getting only the page you cropped
By default the file you download is your whole document, with the crop written onto the pages you named. That is usually right for a print job — the crop is a box on a page, and the rest of the document is still the document.
When it is not, tick Keep only these pages. The download is then just the pages you cropped, at their new size, and everything else is left out of it. The option appears as soon as you choose This page or a range, because that is the moment the question comes up.
It is off unless you tick it, deliberately. Cropping page three of a forty-page catalogue and sending a one-page file to a printer is an expensive way to be wrong; getting a file with more in it than you needed is a cheap one. Your own file is untouched either way — nothing here writes to it.
Pages that are stored turned
A scanner often writes a landscape page as a portrait one with an instruction to display it turned. The margins you type here are named for the page as you see it: the top of the picture is the top, whatever the file says internally. Getting that wrong crops the wrong two sides, and it does not show on screen — only at the press.
What this does not do
It cropped a page. It did not check resolution, colour space, fonts, overprint or trim size, and it makes no claim that the file is ready to print.
- It does not rasterise anything. Text stays text, and vectors stay vectors.
- It does not delete the artwork outside the crop. See above — that is what a crop box is.
- It does not resample or compress. The file that comes back has the same pictures at the same resolution it went in with.
- It will not open a password-protected document.
Checking the file while you are here
If the reason you are cropping is that something looks wrong, two other free pages answer the questions a crop cannot: the PDF DPI checker finds the page with the image that will print soft, and the image resolution checker says how big a single picture can go. Both read the file in your browser, the same way this one does.
To mark up what needs changing rather than change it yourself, annotate the PDF — arrows, boxes and numbered notes, exported as a PDF or a PNG.
When the file is not really the problem
Cropping is the easy part. The expensive mistakes come after it: a proof emailed round, three comments in a reply, a revision, and somebody approving a version nobody meant. That is what Proofavo is for — a proof link your customer opens without an account, comments pinned to the artwork itself, and a record of who approved what and when.