A small, self-contained tool for cropping a region out of a PDF page with your mouse and saving it as a new, single-page PDF.
Use it here: pdfcrop.asariko.net
Or download index.html and open it in any browser — it works exactly the same offline. Drag a rectangle over the part of the page you want, and save. That's it — no installation, no account, no upload to any server.
Most online "PDF crop" tools render the page, let you draw a box, and then rebuild the PDF behind the scenes. That rebuild step is where things tend to go wrong: the output gets an extra blank page, or characters come out garbled because the tool re-encoded the text and fonts incorrectly.
This tool avoids that entirely. Instead of rewriting the page's content, it copies the original page byte-for-byte and simply changes its visible boundary (the PDF MediaBox and CropBox). The text, fonts, and images are never touched, so there is nothing to corrupt and nothing that can duplicate itself into a second page.
- Open pdfcrop.asariko.net, or double-click your downloaded copy of
index.html. - Click Open PDF..., or drag and drop a PDF file onto the page.
- All pages of the document are shown in a single scrollable view — scroll to whichever page you need.
- Click and drag a rectangle over the region you want to keep.
- Click Save Crop as New PDF. The browser downloads a new PDF containing only that one cropped page.
Only one crop is made per save. If you need several crops from the same document, repeat steps 4–5 for each one.
- No installation. It is a single HTML file. Nothing to download from an app store, no Python, no Node, no browser extension to approve.
- No server, no upload. Everything — opening the PDF, rendering it, and cropping it — happens locally in your browser tab. The file never leaves your computer.
- Works offline. Every library the tool needs is bundled directly inside
index.html, so a downloaded copy works with no internet connection. - Cross-platform. Since it's just a web page, it behaves identically on Windows and macOS, in any modern browser.
This makes it easy to distribute inside a team: send the file or drop it on a shared drive, and anyone can use it without admin rights or IT approval.
- PDF rendering (so you can see and select a region) is done with pdf.js.
- Building the cropped output PDF is done with pdf-lib.
- Both libraries are inlined into
index.html, which is why the file is large (~2.3 MB) and why it needs no network access. - The crop itself works by copying the selected page into a new one-page document and setting its
MediaBoxandCropBoxto the selected rectangle — the same mechanism professional PDF editors use, and the reason the output keeps its original, selectable, searchable text instead of turning into a flattened image.
- One crop per save. The tool is intentionally simple; it does not currently support collecting several crops from different pages into a single output PDF.
- Very large PDFs (hundreds of pages) will take a few seconds longer to render, since every page is drawn when the file is opened.
| File | Purpose |
|---|---|
index.html |
The tool. Open this file in a browser, or visit the hosted version. |
pdf_crop.py |
An alternative desktop version for personal use on a machine that has Python installed (Tkinter + PyMuPDF). Not needed if you're using index.html. |
assets/, style.css, script.js, tailwind.css |
Site styling and shared header/footer behaviour for the hosted page. |
tailwind.config.js, in.css |
Build inputs used to regenerate tailwind.css. Not needed at runtime. |
CNAME |
Custom domain for GitHub Pages. |
To regenerate the stylesheet after changing any classes in index.html:
npx tailwindcss@3 -c tailwind.config.js -i in.css -o tailwind.css --minifyFree to use, not for sale. Licensed under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 — see LICENSE.
You may use, copy, modify and share it for personal, research, educational, charitable and government purposes. You may not sell it or use it commercially.