Scanned pages often come with wide grey borders, slides exported to PDF carry empty space around them, and e-books are easier to read on a phone without big white margins. Cropping cuts the page down to the part you actually want to see.
Open a PDF, draw the area to keep on the preview — or type the margins in millimetres — and apply it to every page or only the page you are looking at. The PDF is opened and saved inside your browser.
How to use
- Select or drop one PDF file.
- Drag on the preview to draw the area to keep, move the box, or drag a yellow corner — or type the top, right, bottom and left margins in mm. “Auto-trim white margins” can fit the box for you.
- Choose All pages or This page only (use the page arrows to pick the page).
- Press Crop PDF and download the file ending in “-cropped.pdf”.
Why use Deftivo
Precise or quick
Drag the box by eye, type exact margins in millimetres, or let the tool find the white margins of the page.
Content stays sharp
Only the page boundaries change. Text stays selectable and nothing is re-compressed or turned into an image.
No upload
The PDF is read and saved in your browser, so it never passes through a server.
Cropping hides — it does not delete
A PDF crop works by changing the page's visible area (its CropBox and MediaBox). Everything outside the box is hidden, but it is still inside the file, and anyone with a PDF editor can make it visible again. The file size usually stays about the same for the same reason.
So do not use cropping to remove personal or confidential information. For that, the content has to be properly redacted, not just hidden.
Pages of different sizes
With All pages, the same margins are cut from every page. If one page is too small for those margins, the tool tells you which page so you can reduce them or crop that page separately.
Frequently asked questions
Can I crop just one page?
Yes. Use the arrows or the page box to show that page in the preview, choose “This page only”, then press Crop PDF. The other pages are left as they were.
Does cropping make the file smaller?
Usually not by much. The parts outside the box are hidden rather than removed, so the file keeps almost all of its data.
Is it safe for removing sensitive information?
No. Hidden content can be revealed again with a PDF editor. Use a proper redaction tool for anything confidential.
What about rotated pages?
The margins are always applied the way the page looks on screen, so “top” means the top of the page as you see it, even if the page is stored sideways.
What about password-protected PDFs?
Remove the password in a PDF reader first. Encrypted PDFs cannot be opened or changed without it.