How to Crop a PDF: Kill Those White Margins in a Minute

You scan a contract and the result looks rough: an inch of white space around the text, a black bar where the scanner lid didn't close, and on your phone you're zooming in constantly. Don't rescan it. Just crop the PDF.

When cropping makes sense

Mostly for scans and phone photos of documents, slide decks exported with a wide frame, and ebooks you want to read on a smaller screen. A cropped page shows up bigger on mobile, the text is easier to read, and printouts stop looking like a 90s photocopy.

Step by step

1. Upload the PDF to a crop tool.

2. On the first page, drag a box around the content you want to keep.

3. Choose whether the crop applies to every page or just this one. Scans from the same scanner usually need only one crop for the whole file.

4. Check the preview of the last few pages — that's where text tends to creep closest to the edge.

5. Download the finished file.

Watch out for this

Some tools only hide the margins while the data stays inside the file. If you're cropping to remove something sensitive, like an account number in the margin, use redaction instead. And leave a few millimetres of breathing room so you don't lose the page numbers.

FileTools lets you crop, rotate and compress PDFs in one place, no install needed. And if you're turning that document into a video walkthrough, TubeVoice can dub it into other languages.