How to Crop a PDF (Remove Margins, Trim Pages)
Crop PDF pages to remove margins, borders, or headers — with a live frame preview. Works on selected pages or the whole document, entirely in your browser.
Scans come with scanner edges. Slides exports come with wide margins. Screenshots come with interface chrome. Cropping cleans all of it up — and with a live preview, you can see exactly what remains before committing.
Crop with a live frame
Open Crop PDF and choose your document. The tool shows a large preview of the focused page with a crop frame; every adjustment to the top, right, bottom, or left amounts moves the frame in real time. What's inside the frame is what the final page will be.
Presets cover the common cases: light trim (4% per side) for scans with modest margins, and strong trim for bordered exports. Per-side sliders handle everything else.
Selected pages or the whole document
Crop often applies to just some pages — the scan pages with black edges, not the clean digital pages. Select exactly those pages and only they are cropped. With nothing selected, the crop applies to every page, which is right for uniformly-padded documents like slide decks.
What cropping does and doesn't remove
Technically, cropping sets the page's crop box: viewers, printers, and most tools show only the cropped area. The underlying objects outside the box generally remain in the file — which is why cropping is non-destructive to the page content, and also why cropping alone isn't a way to hide sensitive content. Remove that content (or those pages) before sharing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do files get uploaded to a server when using the Edit tools?+
No. All tools mentioned in this guide run 100% locally on your device inside your web browser using WebAssembly and Web Workers. Your files are never uploaded to any remote server.
Is there any cost, subscription, or watermark added?+
All tools are completely free, open, and unlimited. Output files are downloaded directly in their original resolution with zero watermarks or quality penalties.
Can I perform this workflow offline?+
Yes. Once the web application is loaded, PrivatePDF operates offline through its Service Worker PWA caching.