Cropping a PDF page lets you remove unwanted margins, white borders, or content at the edges of a page. It's commonly used to clean up scanned documents, remove headers and footers that aren't needed, or resize content to fit a specific display or print size.
How to Crop a PDF Page Online
WukongPDF's PDF Crop tool lets you set a custom crop area for any page. Upload your PDF, draw the crop box by dragging the handles to define the area you want to keep, and apply it. You can crop a single page or apply the same crop to all pages at once โ useful when every page has the same border or margin you want removed. Download the cropped PDF when done.
For precise control, look for tools that let you enter exact measurements โ specifying margin values in inches or millimeters rather than dragging manually gives more consistent results, especially when you need the crop to be pixel-perfect.
How to Crop a PDF in Adobe Acrobat
In Adobe Acrobat Pro, go to Tools > Edit PDF > Crop Pages. Draw a crop box on the page to define the area to keep. Double-click inside the crop box to open the Set Page Boxes dialog, where you can enter precise margin values and choose whether to apply the crop to all pages or a specific range. Click OK and save.
Acrobat's crop tool works by adjusting the PDF's crop box โ a metadata setting that tells viewers which portion of the page to display. Importantly, the content outside the crop area is hidden but not deleted. This means you can undo the crop later by widening the crop box, and it also means the file size doesn't decrease after cropping.
Cropping a PDF on Mac Using Preview
Preview on Mac supports cropping through the markup toolbar. Open the PDF, click the markup toolbar icon, and select the rectangular selection tool. Draw a selection around the area you want to keep, then go to Tools > Crop (or press Cmd + K). Preview crops the visible page area and saves the change. Unlike Acrobat, Preview's crop in some versions permanently removes the hidden content.
Cropping All Pages vs Individual Pages
When a consistent border exists on every page โ common with PDFs exported from web pages or created with default margins โ applying the same crop to all pages saves significant time. Most crop tools offer a Select All Pages option or let you input a page range before applying.
For documents where pages have different layouts โ like a mix of portrait and landscape โ crop each page type separately. Using WukongPDF's PDF Crop tool, you can set one crop for the portrait pages, apply it, then set a different crop for the landscape pages in a second pass.
Does Cropping Reduce File Size?
Cropping alone typically doesn't reduce file size because the hidden content is usually still stored in the file. To permanently remove the cropped-out content and reduce file size, run the cropped PDF through a PDF Compression tool afterward. The compression step re-processes the page content, discarding data that falls outside the visible crop area and producing a genuinely smaller file.