How to Crop PDF Margins
Scanned documents often come with wide margins, stray scanner artifacts near the edges, or headers you’d rather not print. Crop PDF trims that away, either by drawing a crop rectangle or by typing exact margin values in points.
Two crop modes, and why the difference matters
PageFlow’s crop tool offers two distinct modes:
- Preserve page size, hide the cropped area. The page’s physical dimensions stay the same, but the cropped-out region is hidden from view and print (this uses the PDF’s crop box). This is the safer default if you’re not sure which you want, since it doesn’t alter the underlying page geometry.
- Resize the page to the crop bounds. The page itself shrinks to match your crop rectangle. Use this when you specifically want smaller physical pages — for example, preparing a document for a different paper size.
Crop settings are never applied silently to pages you didn’t select — you explicitly choose current page, selected pages, or all pages each time.
Steps
- Open Crop PDF and upload your document.
- Enter margins in points for each side (top, right, bottom, left), or use the visual crop box on the page preview.
- Choose your crop mode: preserve page size, or resize to the crop bounds.
- Choose which pages it applies to.
- Export the cropped document.
A practical margin reference
72 points equals one inch. A modest half-inch trim on each side is 36 points; a full inch is 72 points. If you’re not sure how much to remove, start conservative — you can always crop again from the original file if you need more.
Combine with other cleanup
Cropping pairs naturally with Rotate PDF for scans that came in sideways, and with Organize PDF if the same batch also needs pages reordered or removed. All three live in the same reusable workspace, so you don’t need to re-upload between steps.