Cropping changes the frame, not the content
A crop moves the visible boundary of the page. The words and images inside it are untouched — nothing is re-rendered, re-compressed or redrawn. What changes is where the page edge sits.
That has one consequence worth stating plainly: content outside the crop is hidden rather than destroyed. For tidying margins that is exactly right. For hiding something confidential it is not enough — use Delete Pages, or remove the content before it reaches the PDF.
How to use it
Drag a box over the area you want to keep. Apply it to the whole document, or type a range like 1-3,5 if only some pages need it — useful when the first page is a title sheet with different proportions from the rest.
Work from the preview. Crops that look generous on screen often clip a page number or a footer, and it is easier to notice that before exporting than after.
What people crop
Scanner margins, which are frequently enormous and make every page look like it is floating. Slide decks exported to PDF with a fixed footer band nobody needs. Screenshots pasted into a document with the browser chrome still attached. Wide spreadsheets where half the page is empty.
There is also a reading reason: cropping a book scan down to the text block makes it dramatically more comfortable on a tablet or e-reader, because the text can then fill the screen.
Crop or resize — they are not the same thing
Cropping changes which part of the page is visible. It does not change the paper size the page claims to be, and it does not scale the content up to fill the new area. A page cropped to half its width is a narrow page containing the same text at the same size.
That is usually what you want for reading on a tablet, where the reader will fit the narrower page to the screen and the text ends up larger. It is not what you want if you need the output to print as A4 — for that, crop first and then set the page size when exporting from whatever produced the document.
Crop once, and check the corners
Cropping is not cumulative in a helpful way. Crop, look, crop again and you will slowly eat into the content, because each new box is measured against the already-cropped page. Get it right in one pass with the preview rather than converging on it.
The corners are where crops go wrong. A box that looks comfortable in the middle of the page can clip a page number at the bottom, a reference code in a header, or an initialling box in the margin of a contract — precisely the small marks that matter legally and that nobody notices missing until later.
If pages vary — a title sheet, a fold-out table, a landscape appendix — crop by range rather than applying one box to everything. A single crop across a mixed document will always be wrong somewhere.
What happens to your files
Every one of these runs in your browser. The file is read from your disk, processed in memory and handed back as a download — there is no upload, no server copy and no account.
Because a crop only adjusts the page box, the result is as sharp as the original and the text inside it stays selectable.
Frequently asked questions
Does cropping delete the content outside the box? No. It hides it by moving the page boundary. For genuinely removing information, delete the page instead. Treat a crop as presentation, not redaction: the hidden content is still present in the file and can be recovered.
Can I crop only some pages? Yes. Apply the crop to all pages, or type a range such as 1-3,5 to limit it. Ranges are worth using whenever the document is not uniform, such as a title page with different proportions from the body.
Will the text still be selectable? Yes. Nothing inside the crop is re-rendered, so text, links and quality are unaffected. That is the practical advantage of cropping over converting to an image, which would flatten everything into pixels.
Is the file uploaded to crop it? No. The crop is applied in your browser and the new file is generated locally. The crop is applied by adjusting each page's box and the file is written out locally as a download.
Related: Rotate PDF · Organize Pages · Compress PDF · All tools