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Crop the margins off a PDF

Trim white space from the edges of PDF pages free, with no signup. Useful before printing a scan, and reversible because nothing is deleted.

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Scans often have a wider margin on the bound edge, which alternates between odd and even pages.

Results appear here. Nothing is uploaded.

    How it works

    A PDF page carries two rectangles. The media box describes the sheet of paper and the crop box describes the region a reader should actually display. This moves the crop box inward by the amounts you give, in points at seventy-two to the inch, and leaves the media box and every drawing instruction alone. Pages that would be left smaller than twenty points across are skipped rather than clamped, and the result panel reports how many were changed.

    What to watch out for

    Nothing is deleted, so nothing gets smaller

    The content outside the new crop box is still in the file, merely not displayed. That makes the change reversible, and it means the file size barely moves. Anyone determined to see what was trimmed can widen the crop box again in a PDF editor.

    Content in the margins disappears from view

    Page numbers, headers, footers and marginal notes live exactly where you are trimming. On a scanned book the running head at the top is usually what people want gone; on a report the page numbers usually are not. Check one page before running a long document.

    A bound scan has uneven margins by nature

    Pages scanned from a book have a wider margin on the spine side, and that side alternates between odd and even pages. Trimming the same amount from left and right therefore cuts too much from one and too little from the other. Running the tool twice with a page range for each side is the honest workaround.

    Limits

    Files up to about 100 MB work reliably. Beyond that, the ceiling is your device's memory rather than any rule we impose — the work happens on your own machine. Tested in Chrome 140, Firefox 143, Safari 18.

    Why margins are worth removing

    Two reasons, and they are different from each other.

    Screen reading. A scanned page on a tablet is mostly white border, and every one of those pixels is display area the text is not using. Trimming the margins can make the difference between a page you can read at full width and one you have to pinch and drag around.

    Paper. Printing a scan with generous margins onto a page that also has printer margins gives you the text in a small box in the middle of the sheet. Cropping first lets the printer scale the remaining content up to fill the paper.

    Combining this with laying several pages on a sheet is the usual pairing: trim first, then place two or four per sheet, and the result is dense and readable rather than dense and tiny.

    What “crop” means in a PDF, which is not what you might expect

    Nothing is cut away.

    Every PDF page carries a media box — the sheet — and a crop box — the part a reader should show. Editing tools that “crop” a PDF almost always move the crop box, and this one is no different. The drawing instructions for the trimmed area are still in the file, untouched.

    The consequences are worth knowing. The change is reversible: open the file in an editor, widen the crop box, and the margins come back. The file does not shrink, because nothing left it. And anything you cropped away for privacy reasons is still there for anyone who thinks to look — if the goal is to remove content rather than hide it, this is the wrong tool and rendering the pages to images is the honest route.

    Points, and how many of them a margin is

    The unit is the PDF point: seventy-two to the inch, so about twenty-eight to the centimetre.

    A typical word-processor margin is one inch, which is 72 points — the largest preset here. Forty points is a little over half an inch, which suits the generous white edge most scanners leave. Zero on an edge leaves it alone.

    Because the numbers are absolute rather than proportional, a document with mixed page sizes will be trimmed inconsistently. Pages that would end up smaller than twenty points across are skipped entirely, and the count of pages actually changed appears with the result.

    Nothing is uploaded

    The document is opened, adjusted and saved in a Web Worker in your browser. Scans of letters, contracts and identity documents are exactly what gets cropped, and exactly what should not be posted to a server on the way.

    Your files never leave your browser. Last updated 2026-08-02.