Crop PDF

Crop PDF pages online by trimming a margin of your chosen width from all four sides of every page. Scans arrive with black borders, exported slides carry acres of empty space, and journal articles bury small text inside huge margins — cropping fixes all of it in one pass. PDFora does the work inside your browser with local processing, so the document you are trimming never gets uploaded anywhere.

The tool takes one number: how many points to remove from each edge. A point is 1/72 of an inch, so trimming 36 points shaves half an inch off the top, bottom, left, and right of every page at once. Because the same margin comes off each side, the page stays centered and the whole document remains uniform — no wobbling edges from page to page.

It is free, requires no account, and adds no watermark to your output. There is no page limit and no daily quota either. If the first pass trims too little, run the result through again with a bigger number; each pass takes seconds because nothing travels to a server.

How to crop a PDF online

1. Open the crop tool on getpdfora.com and add your PDF by clicking or dragging it in.
2. Decide how much margin to remove — 72 points equals one inch, and 28 points is roughly one centimeter.
3. Enter the margin value. The same amount will be trimmed from the top, bottom, left, and right of every page.
4. Apply the crop and let your browser process the file locally — no upload, no queue.
5. Download the trimmed PDF and check that no text or figures were clipped.
6. If the margins are still too wide, run the cropped file through again with a larger value until it looks right.

When to use this tool

• Remove the dark borders and scanner shadow that appear around scanned pages, so the document prints clean.
• Trim PDF margins on academic papers before reading them on a tablet or e-reader, making the text noticeably larger on screen.
• Tighten slide decks exported to PDF, cutting the empty frame around each slide so the content fills the page.
• Cut printer-added white space from documents that were 'printed to PDF' with default margins you never asked for.
• Clean up ebook page proofs by shaving bleed and trim areas before sharing a reading copy.
• Prepare drawings or forms for re-printing at full size by removing the border left over from the original layout.

Tips for the best results

• Start conservative. Trim 20 to 30 points first and inspect the result — you can always crop again, but clipped text means starting over from the original.
• Convert in your head before typing: 72 points is one inch, 28.35 points is one centimeter. A typical office margin is about 72 points.
• Watch out for page numbers and footers sitting close to the edge; they are usually the first thing an aggressive crop removes.
• Equal cropping suits uniformly laid-out documents best; if one page has unusually tight margins, check it before downloading.
• Crop before adding page numbers or headers with other PDFora tools, so the new elements are positioned relative to the final page edges.