CornerTools

Crop PDF

Crop PDF pages to an area, trim white margins, or cut out a card such as Aadhaar to print at actual size.

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Crop
Pages
Page size

Cuts PDF pages down to the part you need: wide white margins off a scanned book, the table from a report, a page made to fill A4. It also cuts a card, such as the one at the foot of an e-Aadhaar, out of its page and lays front and back on a sheet to print at the card's real size. The PDF is cropped on your device and never uploaded.

How to use it

Add a PDF; one that needs a password asks for it, and the cropped PDF has none. Step through its pages with the arrows above the page. Then choose how to crop:

  • Draw a crop: drag the box on the page, or its edges, or type the margins in millimetres. The same margins crop every page chosen under Pages: all, the page shown, odd or even pages, or pages you type, as in 1-3, 5. A page too small for the margins is left as it is, and the result says so.
  • Trim white margins: each page is cropped to its own content, found on a drawing of it at 72 DPI, with 2 mm left around it. The page shown marks where it will be cut. A blank page, or one printed to its edges, is left as it is.
  • Card to print: draw a box around the card's front, switch to Back and draw one around the back. Keep the card's shape holds the box to a card's proportions. Make print sheet places both at 85.60 × 53.98 mm on an A4 sheet, side by side with cut lines. A box of another shape is fitted inside the card, never stretched.
  • Page size: As cropped leaves each page the size of its crop; A4 or Letter scales the crop to fill the paper, centred, turned to landscape for a wide crop. Links and form fields move with the content.
  • Remove cropped content: see below.

The cropped PDF is named after the original, as in scan-cropped.pdf, and the card sheet as in aadhaar-card-print.pdf.

Hidden or removed

By default the tool crops the way PDF readers do: it sets each page's crop box, the part of the page a reader shows and prints. Nothing is redrawn, so text stays selectable and sharp, and the file barely changes in size. But what was cut off is still in the file: an editor can widen the crop box again, and text outside it can still be found by copying or searching some readers.

With Remove cropped content, each cropped page is drawn as an image of the crop at 300 DPI and the page's content replaced by it, so nothing outside the crop remains. The cost: text on those pages can no longer be selected or searched, their links and form fields go, and the file grows with the images. Use it when the cut-off part must not reach whoever gets the file.

Card size

The card sheet uses the ID-1 size of ISO/IEC 7810, 85.60 × 53.98 mm, the size of bank and identity cards. Printed at Actual size (100% in the print dialogue), each card comes out at that size; Fit to page scales the sheet to the printer's margins and makes the cards a little smaller.

Sources

Reviewed

Frequently asked questions

Add the e-Aadhaar PDF, entering its password, and choose Card to print. Draw the front box over the card-shaped front near the foot of the page, switch to Back and draw over the back, then Make print sheet. Print the sheet at Actual size and cut along the grey lines. The printout is a copy for your own use; the e-Aadhaar's digital signature covers only the original PDF.
Not by default: it is hidden, as every PDF reader hides what lies outside a page's crop box, but it stays in the file. Turn on Remove cropped content to take it out, described under Hidden or removed.
The print dialogue scaled it. Choose Actual size, or a scale of 100%, rather than Fit to page or Shrink to fit, and print on A4. Measure a card on the printout: it should be 85.6 mm wide.
No. Your browser reads, crops and saves the files on your device; they are not sent to CornerTools or anyone else, and neither is a password you type. To check, open the browser's developer tools at the Network tab and add a PDF: no request carries it. The PDF engine downloads from this site the first time you use it: a download to your browser, not an upload of your file.

See also

  • Unlock PDF — to save a copy of a password-protected PDF, such as an e-Aadhaar, without its password.
  • Split PDF — to take out whole pages rather than parts of them.
  • Compress PDF — to make a PDF smaller after removing cropped content as images.