Cropping a PDF trims extra margins or cuts out part of a page, so you can focus on what matters, make text bigger on small screens or prepare pages for printing. It’s handy for scanned documents with wide borders, slides with extra white space and screenshots saved as PDFs.
On a Mac: open the PDF in Preview, click the Markup button, use the Rectangular Selection tool to draw a box around the area you want to keep, then choose Tools > Crop (or press Command-K). Repeat for each page or select multiple thumbnails to crop them together. With Adobe Acrobat, use the Crop Pages tool to set margins for one page or many pages at once.
On Windows: free tools and many PDF editors include crop features. Another workaround is to print the PDF to PDF with a custom scale or page size, though this is less precise.
Important note: in many tools, cropping only hides the content outside the crop box rather than deleting it. The hidden content may still exist in the file and could be revealed later. If you’re cropping to remove private information, use a proper redaction tool or flatten the PDF by exporting it as images and back to PDF.
Tips: crop consistently across pages so the document looks neat, keep a backup of the original and check the result on another device. If you need to change the overall page size, look for resize or page setup options instead.
Privacy note for How to Crop a PDF: avoid uploading sensitive documents, like tax forms or IDs, to tools you don’t trust. Built-in apps on your phone or computer handle most PDF tasks without sending your file anywhere.
Quick tip for How to Crop a PDF: always keep a copy of your original file before converting, compressing or editing, and open the final PDF on a second device to confirm fonts, images and page order came through correctly.
For official help, visit Apple Support. Find how to resize a PDF and remove pages from PDF guides on Minedit.