Crop PDF

• Reading on a phone or tablet. A standard A4 with wide margins wastes a third of the screen on whitespace. Cropping makes the content fill the viewport.
• Trimming scanner edges. Black borders, shadow lines, or paper-edge artifacts from a scanner removed cleanly.
• Removing page numbers or headers. Strip running headers before reusing a chapter as a standalone PDF.
• Cropping to a specific region. Pull just one diagram or table out of a busy page for use elsewhere.
• Saving ink on print. Cropped pages need less ink for borders.

1. Open Crop PDF.
2. Drop your PDF.
3. Set the crop rectangle visually with handles, or by numeric inputs (left/top/right/bottom margins in points).
4. Choose current page or all pages.
5. Click Save and download the cropped PDF.

Cropping in PDF is non-destructive by default — it sets the page's CropBox, which controls what's visible without discarding the trimmed content. If you also want to permanently remove the trimmed pixels, run the output through Flatten PDF.

PDFs have multiple page boundary boxes:

• MediaBox — the page's physical size (usually A4 or Letter).
• CropBox — what most viewers display.
• TrimBox / BleedBox — print-production related.

SwissArmyPDF updates the CropBox, which is the right answer for "I want this to display cropped." The hidden content stays in the file but isn't shown. To actually discard the content (smaller file size, no way to recover the original margins), flatten after cropping — that re-rasterizes affected pages.

If you're cropping for privacy reasons (e.g. removing a name in the page margin), the CropBox-only approach is NOT enough. Use Redact PDF instead, which permanently destroys the content.

• 10mm uniform. Removes most standard padding while keeping text comfortable from the edge.
• Strip header (top 20mm). Drops running titles and page numbers without affecting body.
• Strip footer (bottom 20mm). Same idea for footers.
• Phone-screen aspect ratio. Crop the sides to roughly 9:16 for portrait-phone reading.
• Tablet aspect. Lighter side-crop to ~3:4 — fills an iPad better than the source A4.

• Content got cut off. Your crop box was too aggressive. Re-open the original (we don't modify it) and try larger margins.
• Cropped, but content still shows in print. Some printer drivers honor MediaBox over CropBox. Run through Flatten PDF after cropping to make the crop permanent.
• Crop didn't apply to all pages. Confirm you selected "all pages" before clicking Save.
• Need to crop different regions on different pages. Current version applies one crop globally. For mixed-page workflows, split first with Split PDF, crop each chunk separately, then re-merge with Merge PDF.

Cropping is often a layout adjustment before sharing — but the source PDF may contain content you don't want online (margins with hand-written notes, headers with internal classifications). Uploading the source for processing means that content briefly sits on someone's server. SwissArmyPDF crops in your browser via pdf-lib — nothing leaves your device.

• Flatten PDF — make the crop permanent (also reduces file size).
• Compress PDF — shrink the cropped PDF for sharing.
• Redact PDF — if you actually need to hide content, not just trim margins.
• Merge PDF — recombine cropped sections into a final document.