Crop a PDF

Cropping trims the margins off every page (the scanner's black border, the slide deck's dead space, the whitespace around a receipt), so the part you want fills the page. Set how much to shave off the top, right, bottom, and left, in millimetres, inches, points, or a percentage of the page, and every page is trimmed to match. The preview updates as you go, so you can dial it in before you download.

Most crop tools do not delete anything. They shrink the box a viewer draws, or they clip the page behind a smaller frame, and either way the part you cut off is still sitting in the file for anyone who knows how to widen the frame again. That is fine for tidying margins and quietly wrong if you cropped something out because you did not want it seen.

So the default here is to actually delete it. Pick "Delete the cropped-out area" and each cropped page is re-rendered and rebuilt from the kept region only: the trimmed pixels are never drawn, never encoded, and are not in the file you download. Before the file reaches you it is checked — every page that was cropped has to come back with no extractable text left on it, or the crop fails and you get nothing rather than something that merely looks trimmed. The trade is that those pages become images, so they lose selectable text and links and the file gets bigger.

The other two settings are honest about being cosmetic. "Keep text selectable" gives you vector output with working text and links. "Keep links and form values" narrows the visible page instead: links keep working and filled-in values stay visible, though the fields themselves generally stop being editable, since rebuilding the file drops its form dictionary. In both, the trimmed area is hidden rather than gone, and the tool says so where you choose. All three crop exactly the same rectangle; they differ only in what survives. Everything runs in your browser, and the original on your disk is never touched.