Crop PDF

Hidden, not deleted. Crop PDF sets the page's CropBox to your chosen rectangle, which tells viewers and printers to display only the cropped region. The full page content remains in the file underneath — text, images, everything. This is reversible: open the cropped file in Crop PDF again, expand the rectangle back to the page edges, and the original layout returns. The upside is non-destructive editing and tiny file-size impact. The downside is that someone determined to recover the hidden margins can do so by opening the file in a PDF editor and resetting the CropBox. If you need true destructive cropping (with hidden content removed entirely), the tool will not do that — open a feature request for a permanent crop option.

Yes, with the Per-page crop mode. Switch from Apply to all pages to Per-page crop at the top of the editor, then click each page thumbnail to load it and draw a unique rectangle. This is essential for documents with mixed-aspect-ratio pages — a portrait body with landscape charts, for example. The tool remembers each crop rectangle independently and applies all of them when you save. There is no limit on per-page customization. If you start in per-page mode and decide you want a single uniform crop, switch to Apply to all pages and the most recent rectangle becomes the new default for all pages. Switching back to per-page mode preserves the individual settings you had before.

No. Because cropping changes the visible region but not the underlying content stream, all the original text remains in the file. PDF readers may still let users copy text from the hidden margins if they select carefully — only the display is cropped, not the searchable content. If you want hidden text gone entirely (for privacy reasons), use the Redact PDF tool, which physically replaces content with black bars. For purely visual cropping where the underlying text does not matter (most use cases — printing handouts, fitting a screen aspect ratio), Crop PDF is the right choice and preserves selection in the visible region. Hyperlinks inside the cropped area work normally; links anchored outside the cropped area become unclickable.

Yes, when you send the cropped PDF to a printer, the printer will scale the cropped region to fill the chosen paper size — that is the desired behavior in most cases. If you crop a US Letter page to a square in the middle, printing on US Letter paper will produce a square image roughly centered on the sheet (or stretched to fill, depending on print settings). For exact-size printing of the cropped region, set the printer to Actual size or Custom paper size and supply the cropped dimensions. Some scanners and copiers ignore the CropBox and print the full original page — if you see uncropped output, open the file in a viewer that respects CropBox (like Adobe Reader) and print from there.

PDF readers handle CropBox slightly differently. Adobe Reader, Preview, and Chrome show the cropped view by default. Some older or simpler viewers ignore CropBox and show the full MediaBox (the original uncropped page). If your file looks uncropped somewhere, that viewer is at fault, not the file. To force a crop that every viewer respects, you would need to permanently rasterize the cropped region — convert each page to an image with PDF to PNG at the cropped boundaries, then PNG to PDF. That loses text selectability but works universally. For 95% of use cases, the CropBox approach used here is the right tradeoff: small file, preserved text, instant editing.

An auto-crop feature that detects content edges and snaps the rectangle to them is on the roadmap but not yet shipped. Right now you draw the rectangle manually. For evenly-margined documents (research papers, books), drawing the crop once on page 1 and applying to all pages works well — typical margins are consistent throughout the document. For mixed content, switch to per-page mode. If you want a quick automated trim, the Remove blank pages tool detects fully blank pages but not partial margin whitespace. Watch the changelog for the auto-crop feature, which will use the in-browser PDF renderer to render each page, find the bounding box of non-white pixels, and pre-fill the crop rectangle.