How to crop the margins of a PDF
Open Crop pages, choose Remove the white margins to have them found for you, or Trim the margins and type the millimetres, and press Crop it.
Crop pagesFree. Nothing is uploaded.
How to do it
- Open Crop pages and add the PDF.
- Choose Remove the white margins, Trim the margins, or Trim each edge separately.
- Type the millimetres if your choice needs them.
- Type pages in Which pages to crop only some, or leave it empty for all.
- Press Crop it and save the cropped copy.
Three ways to trim
Remove the white margins looks at each page and trims it to just outside its words and pictures, leaving a thin border of about 2 mm. Trim the margins takes the same amount off every edge, from 1 to 100 mm. Trim each edge separately takes a different amount off the top, right, bottom and left, as you see the page: for a scan that sits off-centre, or a document with a wide binding margin on one side.
Scans with black or grey borders
A scanner lid left open, or a photocopy of a page smaller than the glass, leaves a dark band round the page. Remove the white margins looks for white paper, so a dark band counts as part of the page and stays. Trim those by millimetres instead.
To find how wide the band is, open the page in Mark up, choose Measure and drag across it: the length is written in millimetres, measured on the same page you are about to crop, so the number carries straight across. Leave without saving the marks. Paper that came out yellow or grey in the scan can also be too dark to count as margin; millimetres work on any page.
Cropping hides; it does not remove
Cropping sets a new visible edge for each page. Whatever falls outside it is still inside the file, and any PDF editor could widen the page again to show it. That is right for tidying borders, and wrong for hiding a name, an account number or a signature in the margin: for those, Remove areas takes them out of the file for good. It also means cropping hardly changes the file’s size.
Cropping only some pages
Type pages in Which pages, such as 1-3, 7, to crop only those; the rest keep their edges. Edges are measured as you see the page, so the top is the top even on a page that was scanned sideways. If the margin you ask for would leave almost nothing of a page, the tool refuses and names the page, rather than handing you a sliver.
A worked example
Joseph copied a 30-page notebook on an office copier with the lid up, and every page has a black band about 12 mm wide down the left and 8 mm along the bottom. He measures both once with Mark up’s Measure, then opens Crop pages, chooses Trim each edge separately, types 0 for the top and right, 8 for the bottom and 12 for the left, and presses Crop it. The result line repeats the four margins for all 30 pages. He taps Then and chooses Pages per sheet with 2 on each sheet, and the trimmed pages fill their places instead of printing black bands.
After cropping
Trimmed pages print larger when laid out with Pages per sheet, read better on a phone, and look tidier in a merged bundle. To put every page on A4 afterwards, see resize PDF pages to A4. For photos of paper, Scan crops as it straightens each page, which usually beats cropping afterwards.
Questions people ask
Is my file uploaded?
No. The pages are cropped in your browser, and the file stays on your device.
Can I undo a crop?
Your original is never changed, so start again from it. The cropped copy also still holds what was trimmed, which is why cropping is no way to hide anything.
Does cropping make the file smaller?
Hardly. The trimmed parts are still in the file. For a smaller file, use Compress.
Can I crop just one page?
Yes. Type its number in Which pages; the others stay as they are.
Why did Remove the white margins find nothing to remove?
What is on the pages already runs to their edges, the paper is not white enough, or the pages are blank. Trim by millimetres instead.
Your file stays on your device. Foolscap does the work inside your browser, so nothing is uploaded and there is nothing for anyone to keep. How you can check