Crop PDF

Cropping a PDF is fundamentally different from editing the page content. PDFs have a "MediaBox" that defines the full physical page size and a "CropBox" that defines what viewers actually display. Changing the CropBox crops the visible area without touching the underlying content — so a cropped PDF is reversible: open it in a tool that ignores the CropBox and the trimmed margins come back.

SwitchPDF updates the CropBox on every page (or just the pages you specify) using your margin values. The content beyond the new boundary is still inside the file, just hidden from view. This is the same approach Adobe Acrobat uses for its "Crop Pages" feature and is universally compatible with PDF readers.

Common use cases: removing the white scanner border that shows up on every page of a poorly aligned scan; trimming a 2-up book scan into individual single pages; reformatting an A3 document to A4 by cropping; cleaning up edges before printing on a smaller paper size. For destructive cropping (actually removing the off-page content) you would need to re-render each page — we don't do that because it costs quality and few users actually want it.

The tool accepts margins in points (the PDF native unit — 1 point = 1/72 inch) or millimeters. The preview shows the final page size so you can verify before downloading. You can crop all pages uniformly or apply different crops to different page ranges by running the tool twice.