Crop PDF pages, trim margins, remove white space with visual selection. No Adobe Acrobat needed. 100% free, no login, no watermark. Works on iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac.
Drop your PDF to crop the pages
Click to browse or drag & drop
TL;DR — Crop PDF in 30 seconds
Three steps. Under 30 seconds. Files never leave your browser.
Click Browse or drag and drop your PDF. Works on desktop, iPhone, and Android — no file size restrictions on most documents.
Drag directly on the page preview to draw the crop rectangle, then adjust corner or edge handles for precision. The selection applies to every page automatically.
Click Crop PDF and your trimmed file downloads instantly — no watermarks, no signup required.
Why PDFcrest
Precise margin control, no daily limits, no signup — just instant, clean PDF cropping.
Crop PDF pages with a live width/height readout in PDF points as you drag — no guessing, and a built-in rule-of-thirds grid helps you frame the selection accurately.
Most PDF crop operations complete in under 10 seconds. The tool processes entirely in your browser for small files — no upload wait required.
Crop PDF free with no daily limit, no account, and no subscription. Unlike SmallPDF or Adobe which cap free users, PDFcrest is always unlimited and watermark-free.
Crop PDF on iPhone, iPad, Android, or desktop directly in your browser. No app install needed. Full mobile-optimised interface.
Draw your crop selection once and PDFcrest applies it to every page automatically, proportionally scaled to each page's own size — no repetitive manual work.
Cropping runs entirely in your browser with pdf.js and pdf-lib. Your PDF is never sent to a server, so there's nothing to intercept, store, or leak.
See your PDF and draw the crop rectangle directly on the page — no manual coordinate entry like Adobe Acrobat. Drag the corner handles to adjust the selection precisely before applying.
Comparison
| Feature | PDFcrest | Adobe Acrobat Online | SmallPDF / ilovePDF |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crop PDF — Free | ✓ Always free | ✗ Limited free tier | ✗ 2 tasks/day |
| No Signup Required | ✓ Zero signup | ✗ Adobe account | ✗ Email required |
| No Watermarks | ✓ Never | ✓ | ✗ Free adds watermark |
| Visual Drag-to-Crop | ✓ Live pt readout | ~ Manual coordinates | ~ Basic |
| Works on iPhone | ✓ Mobile-first | ✓ App required | ✓ |
| File Deleted After Download | ✓ Immediately | ~ Varies | ~ 1 hour |
| Pricing | ✓ $0 forever | Subscription plans | ~$7–$12/month for unlimited use |
Use Cases
From designers to teachers — everyone needs to trim PDF pages at some point.
Crop PDF pages to match a specific paper size before sending to a print shop. Remove bleed areas, crop marks, or oversized whitespace to get pixel-perfect printed output.
Crop scanned textbook pages or lecture slides to remove irrelevant borders. Share clean, focused content with students without unnecessary whitespace.
Trim PDF files to custom dimensions for brochures, flyers, or magazine layouts. Precise pixel-level crop control ensures your layout stays intact.
Remove scanner borders, blank margins, or header/footer areas from scanned documents. A clean PDF is easier to read and more professional to share.
Crop redacted areas or remove confidential headers/footers from legal documents before sharing specific sections. Control exactly what is visible on every page.
Crop PDF for mobile reading by removing wide margins. Cropped PDFs fill the screen on phones and tablets, making text larger and easier to read without zooming.
Crop out a chart, table, or section from a report PDF and drop it straight into a PowerPoint or Keynote slide — no separate screenshot tool needed.
Workflow Recipes
Cropping is rarely the last step. Here are the tool combinations PDFcrest users chain together most often.
If a scanned document came out rotated 90° or upside down, fix the orientation first — the crop preview is based on how the page currently displays.
Cropping alone doesn't always shrink file size, since trimmed content can still be embedded. Compress afterward if the download needs to be smaller.
Delete blank or irrelevant pages first, so your single crop selection only has to work for the pages that remain.
Crop several PDFs to the same visible dimensions before combining them, so the final document has a consistent page size throughout.
Since one crop selection is scaled proportionally across all pages, split a document with very different page sizes first, then crop each part separately for a cleaner result.
Technical Detail
When you crop a PDF page, PDFcrest modifies the PDF's CropBox — a PDF standard property that tells PDF viewers which region of the page to display. The underlying page content is preserved outside the crop box, but hidden from view. This means cropping is non-destructive by default: the original page data remains in the file.
For a true trim (permanently removing content outside the crop area and reducing file size), combine cropping with PDFcrest's Compress PDF tool after cropping. The compressor re-encodes the page, stripping hidden content and reducing overall file size.
PDFcrest supports all standard PDF page box types. When you set crop values, PDFcrest writes the correct CropBox values in PDF points (1 point = 1/72 inch), ensuring compatibility with Adobe Acrobat, Apple Preview, Chrome, and all major PDF viewers.
Under the Hood
No black box — this is the literal coordinate transform this page runs to turn your on-screen drag into PDF-native CropBox values.
1. Canvas pixels → PDF points (per selection box, y-axis flipped to PDF's bottom-left origin):
scaleX = pageWidthPt / overlayCanvas.width
scaleY = pageHeightPt / overlayCanvas.height
x = round(box.x * scaleX)
y = round((overlayCanvas.height - box.y - box.h) * scaleY)
w = round(box.w * scaleX)
h = round(box.h * scaleY)
2. Applied to every page, scaled to that page's own CropBox (not assumed identical to page 1):
scaleX = page.cropBox.width / pageWidthPt
scaleY = page.cropBox.height / pageHeightPt
page.setCropBox(
page.cropBox.x + x * scaleX,
page.cropBox.y + y * scaleY,
w * scaleX,
h * scaleY
)
| Step | Why it's built this way |
|---|---|
toPdfPt() | Converts your drag selection from on-screen canvas pixels into PDF points (1 pt = 1/72 inch), flipping the y-axis since PDF coordinates start at the bottom-left of the page, not the top-left like a screen. |
getCropBox() scaling | Reads each page's existing CropBox rather than assuming every page is the same size as the page-1 preview, so the same proportional selection lands correctly even on a document with mixed page sizes. |
setCropBox() | Writes the new crop region directly via pdf-lib — no re-encoding of images or text, which is why cropping never affects visual quality. |
FAQ
Answers to the most common questions about cropping PDF files
References & Further Reading
Page last updated: · Written and maintained by the PDFcrest team. The coordinate transform shown above is taken directly from the code running on this page.