Oversized white margins waste screen space on phones and e-readers, and they make printed pages look shrunken. PDF Arranger crops pages two ways: automatically, by removing the white borders around the content, and manually, by setting the margins yourself. This guide covers both, plus the related Hide margins option and when to use each.
A note on scope: cropping in PDF Arranger trims page edges. It is not a tool for removing an element from the middle of a page or editing page content — if content sits inside the area you keep, it stays.
Before you start
You need PDF Arranger 1.14.0 (or a recent version) installed. If it is not on your computer yet, download PDF Arranger first — it is free, open source (GPL-3.0), and works entirely offline, so your files never leave your computer.
Nothing you do in PDF Arranger changes the original file on disk. Every edit only takes effect when you export the result to a new PDF, which makes experimenting safe: if the output is not what you wanted, adjust the arrangement and export again.
Step by step: crop white borders automatically
- Open the PDF and select the pages you want to crop. Select all pages for a uniform result, or just the pages with excess margins.
- Apply Crop white borders to the selection. PDF Arranger detects the content area of each page and trims the surrounding blank margin.
- Inspect the result page by page. Pages with faint content near an edge — a light page number, for example — may be trimmed closer than you expect.
- Export once the pages look right.
Manual cropping
When automatic detection does not match what you want, crop manually instead: select the pages, open the cropping controls, and drag the crop marks (or set the margins) so the kept area frames exactly the content you care about. Manual cropping is the better choice for mixed documents — for example keeping a wide margin on title pages while trimming body pages tightly — and for giving every page the same crop box even when their content differs.
Hide margins is not the same as cropping
Hide margins hides the margin areas of the selected pages rather than cutting the pages down the way a crop does. It is a lighter touch: useful when you mainly want margins out of the way for reading or printing, while a real crop is the option that actually trims the page to the content area. If you are preparing a file to share, test the exported result in another viewer to confirm it presents the way you intended.
Tips
- Bookmarks and links can be lost after using Hide margins, so if the document’s outline matters, check it in the exported file.
- Crop a copy first on important documents. Because the original file is untouched until you export, you can always redo the crop with looser margins.
- Uniform page sizes after cropping also help if you plan to resize or print the document afterwards.
A worked example
Consider a scanned book chapter where every page carries a wide white border from the scanner bed. Select all pages and apply Crop white borders: the text block now fills the page, and the chapter becomes far more readable on a phone or e-reader. Contrast that with a certificate that has a decorative border you want to keep: automatic cropping might trim into the design, so you would crop that page manually with conservative margins instead — or not crop it at all. The lesson is that “crop everything the same way” is rarely right for mixed documents; batch the automatic crop for uniform pages, and handle special pages individually afterwards.
Related guides
Keep going with these step-by-step guides from the same series: