About Crop PDF
You give the tool four measurements, one per edge: how much to trim from the top, the right, the bottom and the left. Enter them in millimeters or inches, whichever your ruler or print specification uses. The page thumbnails preview the crop before you save, so you can adjust the numbers until the text block sits neatly inside its new borders.
The trim can apply to every page or only to the pages you select. That suits mixed documents: a report whose cover is already tight, or a stack of scans where only a few sheets picked up a gray edge from the scanner lid.
What cropping changes inside the PDF
Every PDF page has a crop box, a rectangle that tells viewers and printers which part of the page to display. This tool pulls that rectangle inward by the amounts you entered. Nothing on the page is redrawn or recompressed, so text remains selectable, images keep their resolution and the file size stays about the same. The trimmed strips are hidden, not deleted: everything outside the new edges is still stored in the file, which is why cropping must never be used to conceal sensitive content.
How to use Crop PDF
- Pick the PDF to trimDrag the PDF in or click to browse for it. A thumbnail of each page appears once the file is read. Password-protected files must be opened with Unlock PDF first, and that takes the password.
- Enter the margins to trimChoose millimeters or inches and fill in the amounts for the top, right, bottom and left. Apply the crop to all pages, or click the thumbnails of the ones that need it, and watch the previews show the new edges.
- Save and check the edgesDownload the cropped copy and page through it in your usual viewer. If a line of text or a page number got clipped, start again from the original file with smaller values.
When people use it
Reading scanned pages on a tablet
Scanned book chapters and journal articles often sit inside broad white borders, which makes the text tiny on a small screen. Trim the borders and fit-to-width zoom fills the display with the text itself.
Tidying scanner and photocopier edges
Flatbed scans and photocopies frequently pick up a dark strip along one side. Select the affected pages, trim a few millimeters from that edge, and the pages look clean on screen and on paper.
Viewing a print proof at its finished size
Print-ready files from a designer often include bleed and crop marks around the page. Trim them off using the margin values your print shop gave you to see roughly how the page looks after cutting, and send the untouched original for printing.
Cropping is not redaction
Because trimmed areas are only hidden, cropping is the wrong tool for removing anything private: an account number in a header, a name in the footer, a signature near the edge or a confidential paragraph in the margin. Anyone who receives the file can bring it back by resetting the crop box in a PDF editor, and text in the hidden strip may still turn up when the document is searched, copied or run through a text extractor.
To delete sensitive content for real, use the redaction feature of a PDF editor, which removes the underlying text and images, then search the result for the words you meant to remove to make sure they are gone. pd00 has no redaction tool. If the problem is whole pages rather than parts of them, Delete PDF Pages leaves them out of the new file.
Millimeters and inches side by side
| Inches | Millimeters | Typical use |
|---|---|---|
| 1/8 in (0.125) | 3.2 mm | A common bleed allowance, or a thin scanner edge |
| 1/4 in (0.25) | 6.4 mm | Light tidying of a page border |
| 1/2 in (0.5) | 12.7 mm | Taking back half of a generous margin |
| 1 in | 25.4 mm | Removing a full one-inch office margin |
One inch is exactly 25.4 millimeters. When you are unsure, start with a small value, look at the thumbnails and increase it step by step; trimming too little is easy to fix, while trimming too much clips text.
What this crop tool can’t do
- Odd shapes or holes. A crop is always a rectangle per page, so you can’t cut out something sitting in the middle of a page.
- Different margins in one pass. All selected pages get the same values. When two groups of pages need different trims, crop one group, save, then open the saved copy and crop the other.
- Scale the content. What remains keeps its original size; a cropped page is simply a smaller page. When printing, your print dialog decides whether it is enlarged to fill the sheet or printed at actual size. If you actually want the same content on a different paper format, Resize PDF scales pages instead of trimming them.
- Very long or image-heavy files on a phone. Thumbnails for hundreds of pages use a lot of memory; a computer gets through big documents more smoothly.
Cropping happens in this browser tab, and your PDF isn’t sent to any server; you can check that yourself.