How to Crop PDF Pages on Mac (Free, Without Acrobat)
Trim margins, remove borders, or crop to a specific area on PDF pages — on Mac in Safari or Chrome. No Adobe Acrobat needed.
Mac's Preview can crop PDFs using the rectangular selection tool — but it applies the crop visually (using a MediaBox setting) and many PDF readers ignore this, showing the full original page. FixMyPDF's crop tool permanently crops content into the page, not just the viewport.
Open the Crop Tool in Safari or Chrome
Go to fixmypdf.in/tools/crop-pdf in Safari, Chrome, or Firefox on your Mac. Upload your PDF by dragging from Finder or clicking "Select PDF".
Why Preview's Crop Doesn't Always Stick
Preview's crop modifies the PDF's MediaBox (the visible area) but leaves the CropBox unchanged. Acrobat Reader and other viewers that respect the CropBox will show the original uncropped content. Our tool modifies the actual page content boundaries, so the crop is respected by all readers.
Set Your Crop Margins
Enter the crop margins in the tool: Top, Bottom, Left, and Right offsets (in points, mm, or pixels). Set positive values to trim from each edge. For example, to remove 1cm from all sides (typical for scanned documents with wide borders), enter 28 points for each edge.
Preview the Crop Result
After entering values, a preview shows how the cropped page will look. Adjust the margins until the preview shows exactly the area you want to keep. Apply to all pages or only selected pages.
Common Mac Crop Use Cases
Removing excessive white borders from scanned documents; cropping a double-page PDF spread into individual pages; trimming headers or footers from a report before reusing the content; removing page numbers from a PDF you're reusing in another document.
Cropping to A4 or Letter Size
If your PDF pages have non-standard dimensions (e.g., exported from a design tool), you can crop them to standard A4 (595×842 points) or Letter (612×792 points) size. This ensures the document prints correctly on standard paper without any borders or scaling.
After Cropping on Mac
A cropped PDF is typically smaller in file size since there's less content area. You can further compress it on Mac, merge it with other PDFs, or fix rotation if needed.
Try Crop PDF Now — Free
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Open Crop PDF