How to Crop a PDF (Trim Margins or Unwanted Whitespace)
Updated July 13, 2026
Scanned pages come with black borders, presentation slides have wide margins, and sometimes you only need part of a page — cropping trims a PDF down to just the content that matters.
Steps
- Open Crop PDF and drop your file.
- Drag the crop box to frame the area you want to keep — it applies to every page at once.
- Click Crop, then download the trimmed PDF.
One box, every page
You set the crop area once, and HivePDF maps that rectangle into each page’s own coordinate space — so it lands correctly whether a page is portrait, landscape, rotated, or a slightly different size from the rest. This is standard for documents with consistent margins throughout: scanned books, reports exported with wide whitespace, or slide decks.
What cropping actually does
Cropping sets the PDF’s crop box — the standard mechanism readers use to determine a page’s visible area. That means the content outside the box is hidden, not deleted from the file’s internal data. For most uses (sharing, printing, general cleanup) that’s exactly what you want. If you specifically need the hidden content permanently gone — say, for a document you’re about to share publicly — printing the cropped PDF to a new PDF bakes in only what’s visible.
Notes
Everything runs in your browser, so even a sensitive scan stays on your device throughout. To shrink the resulting file size afterward, use Compress PDF; if pages need straightening first, use Rotate PDF before cropping.