Crop PDF

Crop the margins off a PDF

Scanned pages arrive with grey borders, and slide handouts waste half a sheet on whitespace. Give a margin to trim from each edge, or let Quill find the ink on each page and crop to it.

Runs in your browserNothing is uploadedNo account, no watermark

Cropping moves each page's crop box, so the content outside it is hidden rather than deleted and the file size barely changes. Never crop to conceal something — use redaction, which removes it.

How to crop the margins off a pdf

  1. 1

    Drop in the PDF

    The file is read straight into the page. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no size cap beyond your device's memory.

  2. 2

    Choose how to crop

    Trim a fixed number of millimetres from each edge, crop down to a standard paper size, or let automatic detection find the content on every page and fit the crop to it.

  3. 3

    Pick the pages

    Leave the range blank to crop the whole document, or type something like 2-, 7 to leave the cover alone.

  4. 4

    Download

    Every reader and printer honours the crop box, so the pages open at their new size.

Cropping hides, it does not delete

A PDF page has a media box — the sheet — and a crop box, the part of it a reader shows. Cropping moves the crop box, so the content outside is still in the file and the size barely changes. If the point is to remove something rather than hide it, redact or flatten the page instead.

Automatic finds the ink

Each page is rendered and scanned for pixels darker than paper. The crop is fitted to that bounding box plus the padding you choose, so a page with a wide left margin and a narrow right one gets an asymmetric crop rather than a compromise.

Millimetres, not points

Margins are given in millimetres because that is what a ruler on the printout measures. Internally they become PDF points at 72 to the inch, and the arithmetic happens against each page's own crop box, so a mixed-size document still crops evenly.

Questions

Barely. The hidden content is still stored — cropping only changes which part a reader displays. To actually drop the data, flatten the pages after cropping.

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