How to crop a PDF
Trimming a PDF down to what matters, whether that is shrinking wide margins or cutting every page to one area, works differently from resizing. Here is how, in the browser.
Cropping vs resizing a PDF
Resizing a PDF scales the whole page, content included, up or down to a new paper size. Cropping instead keeps the content at its original scale and simply changes which part of the page is kept, cutting off everything outside the box: wide margins, a header repeated on every page, or a sidebar you do not need. The two solve different problems and are often confused because both change the page's dimensions.
In Adobe Acrobat
Acrobat Pro's Crop Pages tool sets an exact crop box in inches or points, applied to one page, a range, or the whole document, with fine control over how many points to trim from each side. It needs a paid subscription, and the free Acrobat Reader has no crop tool.
Printing "shrink to fit" as a workaround
Printing a PDF to a virtual PDF printer with a smaller paper size crops or scales the page depending on the setting chosen, but it is an indirect way to do something a dedicated crop tool does in one step, and it is easy to end up scaling when you meant to crop, or the other way round.
Cropping in the browser
Stayput's crop PDF tool draws a box over a preview of the page to keep, or trims the white margins from every page automatically in one click, and applies the same crop to the whole document or just the pages you choose. The text inside the kept area stays sharp and selectable, since the underlying page is not re-rendered as an image, and nothing is uploaded to do it.
Questions
Does cropping a PDF change its content, or just what is shown?
A crop hides everything outside the box permanently in the saved file; the page's effective size shrinks to the cropped area. It differs from resizing, which scales the content itself.
Can I crop just the white margins automatically?
Yes, Stayput's crop PDF tool has a one-click auto-trim that finds and removes the white space around the content on every page.
Will the text still be selectable after cropping?
Yes, cropping only changes which part of the page is visible; the text within the kept area stays as real, selectable text rather than turning into an image.
Can I crop only some pages and leave others full-size?
Yes, Stayput's crop PDF tool lets you choose which pages the crop applies to, rather than forcing it onto the whole document.