Crop a PDF
Cut away margins, scanner edges or white space, on one page or all of them.
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Select a PDF file
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Accepted formats: PDF
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Quick facts
- What it does
- Trims the visible area of every page to the margins you set.
- Input
- Output
- Processing
- In your browser
- Files uploaded?
- No
- Account required?
- No
- Best for
- Removing scanner borders, or cutting wide margins so a document reads better on a phone.
- Main limitation
- Cropping changes the visible area, not the content: the trimmed material is still in the file and can be recovered by widening the crop box.
How to use this tool
- Upload your PDF.
- Drag the crop handles on the preview, or type exact margins.
- Choose whether the crop applies to this page or every page.
- Download the cropped PDF.
Why use iBuildPDF
Scanned pages arrive with black edges and grey borders. Slide handouts arrive with enormous margins that waste paper and screen. Cropping fixes both, and is one of the few PDF operations that is genuinely lossless.
How it works
Cropping sets each page's crop box — the area a viewer displays — rather than deleting content. Nothing is re-rendered and nothing is recompressed, so quality is exactly as it was.
Frequently asked questions
Is the cropped-away content really gone?
No, and this matters. Cropping hides content by changing the visible area; the underlying data is still in the file and can be recovered by changing the crop box back. If you are cropping to hide something sensitive, use Redact PDF instead — that one destroys it.
Can I crop pages differently?
Yes. Set a crop for one page and apply it to that page only, then move to the next. Applying to all pages is one checkbox when the pages are the same shape.
Does cropping actually delete what was cut off?
Cropping changes the page boundary that determines what is displayed and printed, so the trimmed area no longer appears. Depending on the viewer, the underlying content can still exist in the file rather than being erased outright. That distinction matters: crop to tidy up margins and scan edges, but never rely on it to hide sensitive information. Use Redact PDF for that.
Can I crop one page or does it apply to all of them?
Either. There is an apply-to-all-pages option that is on by default, which is what you want for trimming a uniform white border off a whole report. Turn it off to crop a single page — useful when one scanned page came out with a different margin from the rest, and cropping everything to match would cut into the good pages.
Why crop instead of just zooming in?
Zoom only changes what you see; the page keeps its original dimensions for everyone else who opens the file. Cropping changes the page size stored in the document, which is what matters when you are printing to a specific paper size, placing pages into a slide deck, or permanently removing letterhead and scanner edges before sharing.
Read more about this
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