Crop a PDF on Mac – Here is the Guide to Crop PDFs for Different Scenarios

Last Updated on August 18, 2022 by Tina Clark


How do you crop a PDF on Mac? If you have PDF documents with a variety of page sizes, you may wish to remove some of the blank corners or margins from the PDF pages to give the papers a more professional and consistent appearance. Because the majority of PDF documents prepared digitally are designed for letter-size paper, you need to crop the PDF size on Mac to print on a shorter paper. Moreover, there are times when you need to merge numerous PDF files from various sources to make a tidy file and you need to crop PDF pages to a specific size.

To the majority of individuals, this procedure appears to be somewhat difficult. However, with the correct tools and techniques, cropping a PDF and creating a new PDF document from the reduced areas is simple. There are various programs available for cropping PDFs on Mac, but not all of them are made equal. In this post, you’ll learn the three different methods for cropping a PDF document on a Mac.

Crop a PDF on Mac

Part 1: How to Crop a PDF on Mac with Batch Process

When you need to crop a large number of PDF files on Mac, PDFelement is the versatile method to cut out the desired part. Whether you need to crop a PDF in a specific area on Mac or cut out the PDFs for printing in batch, you can always get the settings within the program. Apart from removing blank margins from PDF documents, you can also rotate, delete, and insert PDF pages. Moreover, you may put sticky notes, comments, and text boxes in the PDF for future reference and organization.

1. Customize the desired PDF area to cut out the suitable parts of the PDF.

2. Provide the batch process to crop multiple PDFs on Mac at the same time.

3. Apply the OCR algorithm to extract the desired texts and images easily.

4. Edit the PDF documents, such as merge, split, rotate, delete, etc.

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Step 1: Launch PDFelement after installation, select the Open file option and navigate to the folder containing your PDF file. You can click the Crop button under the Edit menu to bring up the crop box and you can find the control panel on the right side.

Open PDF for Cropping PDFElement

Step 2: Cut out any blank borders or corners of the PDF on Mac via dragging the page to change the size of the edge. Moreover, you can simply adjust the numeric value for each region if you want to be more accurate. Simply click the Crop button to crop a PDF on Mac.

Crop One PDF Mac PDFElement

Step 3: To batch crop the PDFs to A4 or any other size you choose, you can also start by combining numerous PDF files. After that, you can also click the Combine PDF button and select multiple PDF files to import and combine all pages into one.

Combine PDF on Mac PDFElement

Step 4: Browse the part of each document that you wish to crop. Apart from cropping PDF files via the Edit panel, you can also crop a PDF using multiple PDF page boxes via Page Boxes. Select the Page Boxes option by clicking the Pages button.

Step 5: When you need to crop a scanned PDF document, you can perform the OCR algorithm beforehand. Click the OCR button from the Edit menu. Choose the Perform OCR button to modify the PDF. To crop the PDF on Mac, click the Crop option to select the area to crop.

Crop PDF Mac OCR PDFElement Win Download Mac Download

Part 2: The Built-in Method to Crop a PDF on Mac via Preview

Preview is more than a PDF editor, which can aid you in cropping PDF files. You can also manually crop a single PDF page on Mac. But it cannot crop a page range including several PDF pages. It only provides a simple feature, which does not allow you to set specific cropping criteria.

Step 1: When you open the desired PDF document with Preview on your Mac, you can go to the Tools menu on the top menu bar and pick the Rectangle Selection option from the drop-down list.

Rectangular Selection Preview

Step 2: Make a selection with your mouse of the region you desire to keep. Then, under the Tools menu, you can choose the Crop command to cut out the desired part of the PDF on Mac.

Cut Out Desired PDF Preview

Part 3: Is It Possible to Crop a PDF on Mac Online

If you don't want to install an application on your Mac to crop a PDF file, you can choose a PDF editor online. Simply upload and crop pages of your PDF while saving space on your device. Sejda is an online PDF cropper on Mac to get the desired part of a PDF document.

Step 1: Go to Sejda PDF cropper on any web browser. Select files from your local computer by clicking the Upload button. Moreover, you can also drag and drop the desired PDF files you want to crop from your MacBook onto the webpage.

Step 2: You can render and edit the PDFs, such as blending them together, and making them simple to determine the crop size that fits all pages. By default, only the first 30 pages are rendered. You have the option of rendering all pages for larger documents.

Step 3: Just crop the specific pages of the PDF, which you can specify for the cropped margins, and input the top, left, bottom, and right margins of the desired PDF page. When you get the desired part, you can click the Auto-crop option to crop the PDF on Mac.

Crop PDF Online Sejda

Part 4: FAQs about How to Crop a PDF on Mac

1Do you lose the quality of the PDF on Mac when cropping?
Cropping or removing only a portion of a PDF, has no effect on the quality of the PDF documents. If you print or show the cropped page at the same size as a page from the entire sensor, however, it will not appear as nice, simply because it contains far less information.
2Does cropping PDF reduce file size?
No. Cropping a PDF does not result in a reduction in file size since data is only concealed, not deleted. You can return the page and its content to its original state by resetting the page size. But if you only cut out the desired part, it should be much smaller than the original PDF.
3Is there an easy alternative to crop a PDF on Mac?
Yes. When you need to crop a PDF on Mac, you can use the snapshot tool to cut out the desired part and save the screenshot in PDF format. Moreover, you can also further edit the PDF documents before sharing or saving them on your MacBook.

Conclusion

As you are aware, you will require the appropriate tool to crop your PDF document on Mac appropriately. PDFelement is the all-in-one tool to remove the margins of the PDF document and edit the PDF with advanced features. Just download the program to find out whether it works now.

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