How to crop a PDF on Windows — without turning it into a screenshot
The built-in Windows trick for cropping a PDF is a Snipping Tool screenshot printed to Microsoft Print to PDF, and it turns the page into a picture. Crop PDF in Edge or Chrome trims the real page instead, keeps the text selectable, and uploads nothing.
Ask how to crop a PDF on a PC with nothing installed and the answer is usually a screenshot: snip the part you want, then print the snip to a PDF. That works, but it trades a document for a picture of one. This covers the browser route that keeps the page real, what the screenshot route costs, and the one thing a crop on Windows does not do.
How do I crop a PDF on Windows?
Open Crop PDF in Edge or Chrome, choose the file, and drag the rectangle's handles in over what you want to keep. Click Apply crop. The copy downloads with _cropped on the end of its name, the text stays selectable, and the file is never uploaded.
Open the tool
Open Crop PDF in Edge or Chrome. There is nothing to install and no account to make.
Choose the PDF
Click the upload area, or drag the file in from File Explorer. Each page is drawn as a preview on your PC.
Pick a mode
On a file with more than one page, choose Same crop, all pages or Crop each page before you start dragging.
Drag the rectangle in
Pull the handles in over the part you want to keep. The area outside dims, so you can see what is being trimmed.
Apply the crop
Click Apply crop. The cropped copy lands in your Downloads folder by default, and the original file is left as it was.
How do I snip a portion of a PDF?
Press Windows+Shift+S, drag a box over the part of the page you want, and the Snipping Tool keeps it as a picture. To turn that picture into a PDF, save it, right-click it, choose Print (on Windows 11 it may sit under Show more options), and pick Microsoft Print to PDF. That is the built-in route most Windows guides give.
It is a real cut, because the trimmed area is simply not in the picture. The price is everything else. The text is no longer text, so the PDF you end up with cannot be searched, copied from or read aloud, and the picture holds only the pixels your screen showed, as our PDF to JPG on Windows guide explains. One more catch at the printing step: the Print Pictures window has Fit picture to frame ticked by default, which trims the snip again to fill the paper. The JPG to PDF on Windows guide covers that window.
Why can't I crop my PDF?
Check for a password first. A PDF that asks for a password to open stops here with a message telling you to unlock it, because its pages cannot be read without that password. Remove the password with Unlock PDF, then crop the unlocked copy.
A file that opens freely but blocks editing is different, and we tested it. We made a PDF with an owner password that switched off copying and editing, then cropped it here. Nothing was asked for, the crop applied, and the copy came out with no restrictions at all. The title survived. If those restrictions were put there by someone else, the crop does not change whether you should be editing it.
How do I crop out parts of a PDF?
Keep one rectangle per page and the rest is hidden from view. That suits margins, scanner edges and the white band under a slide. It does not delete anything: the crop sets a frame, and what falls outside it is still in the file.
We checked this on the cropped copy, reading it with a different PDF engine than the one that wrote it. The trimmed header line was no longer returned when the page text was extracted, which makes it look gone. It was not. The page still contained the instruction to draw that line, outside the frame, and an editor that resets the crop box brings it back. To make an area truly disappear, use Redact PDF, and cropping a PDF is not redaction explains why.
How do I resize a PDF in Windows?
Cropping changes the page's size, not the file's. In our test a US Letter page cropped to a middle band came out 7.65 by 6.6 inches, and the file stayed about the same size because nothing on the page was redrawn. If you need a smaller file, use Compress PDF instead; compressing a PDF on Windows walks through it.
The full walkthrough for any device is How to crop a PDF. On a Mac, Preview has its own crop, covered in How to crop a PDF on a Mac. Crop PDF sits with the other page tools in the organize tools hub.
