How to crop a PDF
- Add your PDF. Drop it onto the box above, or tap to choose a file. The first page appears as a large preview, with small thumbnails of the other pages above it.
- Draw the crop box. Drag the box to move it and drag any corner to resize it. The darker area around it is what will be cut off. You can also type exact Top, Bottom, Left and Right margins in millimetres.
- Choose where it applies. Pick All pages, or Only page to crop just the page on show. Tap a thumbnail to preview a different page.
- Press Crop PDF. When it's done, download the cropped copy. Your original file isn't changed.
Features
- Visual crop box on a sharp page preview, with a readout of the page size before and after cropping in millimetres.
- Exact margins in millimetres for precise, repeatable results. Typed margins and the crop box stay in sync.
- Crop every page or just one, choosing the page from a thumbnail strip.
- Correct on rotated pages. Margins follow the page as you see it, not as it is stored.
- Keyboard friendly. Move the box with the arrow keys and resize it with plus and minus.
- Text stays text. Cropping doesn't turn pages into images, so text remains sharp, searchable and selectable.
- Before and after file size shown with the result.
Why use Fileora to crop PDF pages
PDFs often carry more page than you need. Scanned books have dark borders, slides exported to PDF arrive with wide white frames, and papers set for print leave generous margins that waste space on a phone or e-reader. Cropping trims the page to the part that matters, so it fills the screen and prints larger.
Fileora crops PDFs in your browser with no upload, sign-up, watermark or page limit. The crop box works with a finger on a phone as well as with a mouse. If pages are also sideways, fix them with rotate PDF; to keep only a few pages, use split PDF first.
How PDF cropping works
Every PDF page has a crop box that tells viewers which part of the page to show. This tool changes that box and leaves the page content untouched. That has real advantages: nothing is re-drawn or converted, text and vector graphics keep their quality, and the change is easy to undo in editing software, because the full page is still there.
It also means cropping is not redaction. Text outside the box is hidden, not removed, so it may still be found by search, copied by some programs or recovered by anyone who edits the crop box. If you need to remove content for good, crop is the wrong tool.
For the same reason the file size stays about the same. If you want a smaller file, run the result through compress PDF. For photos and screenshots rather than PDFs, crop image cuts the picture itself.
Tips for a clean crop
Check a few pages before cropping them all. Page numbers, headers and footnotes often sit close to the edge, and margins set on one page can clip them on another. When pages differ, crop the odd ones separately with Only page. Leave a few millimetres of white space around the text so the page doesn't look cramped when printed.