How to Crop a PDF and Remove White Margins
2026-07-23
Margins that look generous on paper are wasteful on a screen. A scanned document, an exported slide deck or an academic paper often carries an inch or more of white space on every edge — which on a tablet or e-reader means the text renders far smaller than it needs to.
Step by step
- Open the Crop PDF tool.
- Drop in your PDF.
- Set how much to trim from each edge. 72 points is exactly one inch.
- Click Crop PDF and download the result.
Cropping does not delete anything
This is the part worth understanding. Cropping sets the PDF's crop box — the region a viewer displays — rather than rewriting the page content. The trimmed area is hidden, not destroyed, which means the operation is fast, completely lossless, and reversible if you crop too far.
Finding the right amount
PDF points are 1/72 of an inch. A standard one-inch print margin is 72 points, and most documents can lose 40 to 60 from each side before anything important gets close to the edge. Start conservative, check the result, and crop again if there is more to take.
When to split first
The same crop is applied to every page, which is exactly right for a consistently produced document — one scan, one export, one template. A document assembled from several sources may have different margins in different sections; split it first with Split PDF, crop each part, then merge them back.
A note on scans
Cropping works identically whether a page holds selectable text or a scanned image, because it changes the page geometry rather than the content. If your scan also has a grey border or skew, crop first and the result will be noticeably cleaner.