How to crop a PDF in Adobe Acrobat — or free, without it
To crop a PDF in Adobe Acrobat, choose Edit, then Crop page, drag a rectangle over what you want to keep, double-click inside it and click OK. That tool is in paid Acrobat, not the free Reader. Crop PDF does it free in your browser, with nothing uploaded.
Acrobat has the most complete crop tool we know of, and it is easy to walk past. It is not on the page, it is not in the free Reader, and its real controls sit in a dialog that only opens when you double-click the rectangle you just drew. This covers that route, the free one that needs no Adobe account, and what our own crop tool does differently, checked by running it.
How do I crop a PDF in Adobe Acrobat?
Open the PDF in Acrobat and choose Edit, then Crop page. Drag a rectangle over the part you want to keep, then double-click inside it. The Set Page Boxes dialog opens, where you fine-tune the margins and pick a page range. Click OK, then save.
Open the Edit tool
Open the PDF in Acrobat and choose Edit in the top toolbar, then Crop page in the left pane. Older versions keep the same command under Tools, in Edit PDF.
Drag over what you keep
Draw a rectangle around the area that should remain. You are marking the keeper, not the part to throw away.
Double-click inside the rectangle
This is the step people miss. Nothing is cropped until you double-click, which opens the Set Page Boxes dialog.
Set margins and page range
Adjust the top, bottom, left and right margins by number if you need to, and choose whether the crop applies to this page, a range or every page.
Confirm and save
Click OK, then save the file. Save under a new name if you want the uncropped original kept.
Why can I not crop a PDF in Adobe?
Usually because the app is the free Acrobat Reader. Crop page lives inside the Edit tool, and Edit is part of paid Acrobat. The other common cause is stopping one step short: a rectangle drawn on the page does nothing until you double-click inside it and click OK in the dialog that opens.
How do I crop a PDF in Adobe for free?
Adobe has a free crop tool on its website. It uploads the PDF to Adobe and asks you to sign in before you crop. To crop free with no upload and no account, Crop PDF does the work inside your browser tab and downloads the result.
How do I crop a PDF without Acrobat?
Open the tool
Open Crop PDF in any browser. It is a web page, so there is nothing to install and no account to make.
Drop in the PDF
Add one PDF. Every page is drawn as a preview on your own device, so a long file takes a moment to appear.
Pick a mode
On a file with more than one page, choose Same crop, all pages or Crop each page. In the second mode you move through the pages with the arrows and drag on each one you want changed.
Drag the rectangle inwards
Pull the handles in over the preview. The area outside dims. Reset crop puts the rectangle back to the full page.
Apply
Click Apply crop. It stays disabled until you have dragged a crop. The file downloads with _cropped added to its name.
The PDF is not uploaded at any point. It is read and rewritten by code running in the tab, and there is no server to send a file to. The plain crop walkthrough covers the two modes in more detail, and Mac users have Preview, covered in how to crop a PDF on Mac.
What does Acrobat do that the free route does not?
- Numbers. Set Page Boxes takes typed margins. Crop PDF is drag only, judged by eye against the preview.
- Page ranges. Acrobat crops a range, such as pages 4 to 9. Crop PDF offers every page or one page at a time.
- Remove White Margins, which trims each page to its content automatically. There is no equivalent here.
- The other page boxes. Acrobat edits the trim, bleed and art boxes that print shops rely on. Crop PDF writes the crop box and nothing else.
- Undoing a crop. Acrobat widens the box again from the same dialog. Crop PDF only ever tightens it.
We ran the last two on a test file and read the result with a different PDF engine from the one that wrote it, and by inflating the raw file to read the page boxes directly. A Letter page with a declared trim box was cropped to its middle half. The output carried a new crop box of 306 by 396 points, while the media box, trim box and bleed box entries were exactly what they were before, so the trim box was now larger than the page a viewer shows. Then we fed the cropped file back in and dragged nothing: the crop box did not move. A second crop of the top half landed inside the first one. There is no way to get the hidden area back with this tool, so keep the original.
Does cropping a PDF remove what is outside the box?
No, in Acrobat or here. A crop changes which part of the page a viewer shows, and the rest stays in the file. Our test PDF was 836,271 bytes before the crop and 836,888 after, with an image and a form field outside the new box. The field was still in the cropped file.
That is fine for trimming scanner edges and a trap for hiding something. The document title also survives, along with every form field, because the file is edited in place and not rebuilt. If the point of the crop was to make something disappear, cropping a PDF is not redaction explains what to do instead.
How do I cut out part of a PDF page?
A crop keeps one rectangle and hides everything around it, so it suits trimming edges. To blank out an area in the middle of a page and have it truly gone, use Redact PDF, which rebuilds each marked page as an image. To pull whole pages out of a document, use Extract Pages.
