Crop PDF
Trim the margins of every page in a PDF.
or drag and drop · max 50 MB
Crop PDF lets you trim the visible area of PDF pages directly in your browser, removing unwanted margins, borders, headers, footers, or whitespace. The need comes up frequently: scanned documents often have large scanner borders around the content; academic papers frequently have wide margins that waste screen space on small displays; PDFs exported from design tools sometimes include bleed areas that shouldn't be visible; and printed documents converted to PDF sometimes include headers or footers you'd rather not pass on. iSavePDF's Crop PDF tool uses pdf-lib to adjust each page's crop box — defining a new visible area — entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded to a server. The tool is free with no account required and no watermark on the output.
Step by step
How to crop pdf on iSavePDF
Open Crop PDF on iSavePDF
Go to isavepdf.com/crop-pdf in any modern browser — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari, or Brave on desktop or mobile. No extension, installation, or account is required.
Upload your PDF
Drag your PDF onto the upload zone or click to browse. The tool accepts a single PDF of up to 50 MB. A visual preview of the first page appears so you can see the current margins before cropping.
Set the crop area
Drag the crop handles on the preview to set the new visible area, or enter precise pixel or millimetre values for the top, bottom, left, and right margins to remove. Choose whether to apply the same crop to all pages or to set the crop per page — useful for documents that alternate between portrait and landscape, or where the content position shifts between pages.
Preview and adjust
Review the cropped preview to confirm the important content is fully within the crop area before converting. Cropping removes visual area but the underlying content is still technically present in the PDF — the crop box defines what's visible, not what's stored.
Apply and download
Click Crop. pdf-lib sets the new crop box on each page and saves the modified PDF to your downloads folder. Everything runs in your browser — no file is transmitted to any server.
How it works
How Crop PDF works
Upload your PDF
Drop the PDF you want to crop into the upload zone.
Set the crop margins
Enter the percentage to trim from each edge — top, right, bottom, left. Start small (e.g. 5%) and adjust.
Download the cropped PDF
The crop is applied to every page in your browser and the file is saved to your device.
When to use it
Common use cases
Removing scanner borders from scanned documents
Flatbed scanners almost always capture a border of black or dark grey around the scanned content — the shadow at the edge of the scanning glass. This border is visible and distracting in the scanned PDF, particularly when viewing on screen or including the scan in a report. Cropping it out produces a clean document where the content fills the page without the scanner artefact border. This is one of the most common PDF cleanup tasks for anyone who works with scanned originals.
Trimming margins from academic papers for reading on small screens
Academic papers follow strict formatting standards that often result in very wide margins — sometimes half the page width is whitespace. On an e-reader, tablet, or phone, this means the text occupies only a fraction of the screen and is very small. Cropping the margins down produces a document where the text occupies nearly the full screen, making it dramatically more readable on small displays. The full content is preserved — only the margins are removed from the visible area.
Removing print headers and footers from converted documents
Documents printed to PDF from web browsers or applications often include headers and footers added by the browser or printer — page URLs, dates, page numbers, or application headers. When the PDF is then shared or republished, these headers and footers look unprofessional and may contain information you'd rather not include. Cropping removes these from the visible area of every page.
Isolating the content area of design exports
PDFs exported from design and presentation tools sometimes include bleed areas, printer marks, or oversized canvases that go beyond the intended visible content area. Cropping to the content bounds removes these production artefacts and produces a clean PDF that looks exactly as the design intended when viewed or printed.
Why iSavePDF
The privacy-first way to crop pdf
PDF cropping tools that operate online require your document to be uploaded to a server for processing. For documents with sensitive content — scanned financial documents, medical records, legal correspondence, internal reports — that upload is an unnecessary exposure. Many of the documents people crop are exactly the kinds of documents they'd prefer not to send to unknown infrastructure.
iSavePDF crops PDFs entirely in your browser using pdf-lib. The PDF is read from your device into browser memory, the crop box is adjusted on each page, and the result is saved to your downloads folder without any file data leaving your machine. The tool is free and funded by display advertising. No upload infrastructure exists — there's nothing to transmit your file to.
Tips & limits
Tips for the best results
Cropping is non-destructive — content outside the crop area is still there
PDF cropping works by setting a 'crop box' that defines the visible area. Content outside the crop box is hidden, not deleted. This means the crop can be reversed by adjusting the crop box again, and some PDF viewers may still display or print the hidden content. For truly removing content from a PDF (not just hiding it), you'd need a PDF editor that permanently deletes the content stream outside the crop area.
Apply the same crop to all pages for consistent results
For documents where all pages have the same layout, applying a single crop setting to all pages simultaneously is faster and ensures consistent margins throughout. For documents with varying layouts or mixed orientations, setting the crop per page gives you more control.
Use with Rotate PDF for scans that need both correction
Scanned documents often need both rotation correction (fixing an off-angle scan) and margin cropping (removing scanner borders). Use iSavePDF's Rotate PDF tool first to correct the orientation, then crop the borders.
Crop before merging for clean combined documents
If you're assembling a document from multiple PDFs with inconsistent margins, crop each one to a consistent page area before merging with Merge PDF. The result is a cohesive document with uniform margins throughout.
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
- Yes — completely free with no account, no watermark, and no usage limits.