Want to crop a PDF on a Mac and didn’t know how to? If you are new to using Mac, or in general a Mac user, then it might sound difficult for you to understand how to crop a PDF on your Mac.
A PDF is one of the most important and popular files as we all have to use it every time. It is one of the safest yet easiest ways to share data and information with anyone. But, what if after creating a PDF document you want to crop out some part or section from the PDF.
I know it might sound tricky for some. You must be wondering can we really crop a PDF on a Mac. Yes, you can definitely Crop, edit, and save the PDF on your Mac.
However, the standard PDF viewer on Mac doesn’t come with any feature that helps you Crop. But you can Crop a PDF if you are using the right tool to do that. There are many free PDF editors available in the market that help you Crop the PDF on your Mac.
Crop a PDF on a Mac with PDFelement:
PDFelement is one of the easiest tools to Edit, Crop, and convert documents on Mac. If you need to Crop a PDF, then I would recommend you to use PDFelement, which is the free and most reliable PDF editor out there.
But first, you have to download the PDFelement on your Mac. After installing the PDFelement, open it, and follow the given below steps:
1. On your Mac, Open the PDFelement.
2. In the main window, click Open File and browse for the PDF document you would like to crop.
3. Once the document is open, click on the Tool tab on the left side, and then select the Crop Pages option.
4. A dotted dialog box will appear around your page.
5. Drag the box to select the area that you want to keep.
6. The area you select will be going to remain the same, and the rest of the document will be cut.
7. If you also need to crop multiple pages, go to the next page to choose the area to Crop again.
8. Once done with all the areas that you want, click the Apply button to crop. The PDFelement will Crop all the pages at once.
9. If you want to Crop all the pages for the same area, then you only need to set the area for one page.
10. Click the button of Apply the same cropping to all pages, and click the Apply Button, it will crop for you immediately.
This PDFelement tool is one of the best reliable PDF editors, powerful yet easy to use. Here are some of the incredible benefits of using PDFelement software:
- It provides the capability to crop a PDF page to a particular size.
- It offers tools to edit text and images.
- The PDFelement comes with the functionality to convert PDF to other formats or other formats to PDF.
- Also, it provides a feature called Annotation tools that let you add comments, highlights, or underlining.
- You can also add sticky notes, comments, text box to PDF for later references.
- It also comes with an OCR feature that can be useful when you want to edit scanned PDF document.
Using Preview to Crop a PDF on a Mac:
A Preview is the image viewer and PDF viewer of the macOS. The Preview tool also helps to edit and Crop PDFs. If you are looking for the easiest tool to crop PDF files, then Preview is it!!
However, the only problem with the Preview tool is that you can only Crop a single page manually with Preview, as it does not support cropping a page of multiple PDF pages.
As well as, Preview does not let you set the exact parameters to crop precisely. These are some of the downsides of the Preview otherwise, it is a great tool.
Following are the steps to use the Preview to crop a PDF on a Mac:
Method 1:
1. Open the PDF file with Preview.
2. After opening your PDF file with Preview, click the Tools > Rectangle Selection button on the top menu.
3. Use your mouse to select the area you want to keep.
4. Then click the Tools > Crop button to crop.
Method 2:
1. Open PDF with Preview.
2. Head to the Show mark-up toolbar marked as following.
3. Then find the Rectangular Selection tool.
4. Select the part you want to crop and click Crop to finish the cropping.
Crop a PDF on your Mac using the Screenshot tool:
Cropping the PDF using the screenshot feature might be one of the fastest. You just have to take the screenshot of the part you want to keep in the PDF, save it, and that’s it!
However, the screenshot tool doesn’t offer you any editing features or versatility. But, still, this trick might be helpful to crop a PDF on your Mac for free.
Here is how you can use a Screenshot to crop a PDF:
- Open the file in Preview or a web browser.
- Users on macOS Mojave later have to press Shift-Command-5 to take the screenshot.
- All other macOS users need to press Shift-Command-4 to take a screenshot.
- Open the newly created PNG image in Preview.
- Select File > Export as PDF and save the cropped image as a PDF.
Using Adobe Acrobat to Crop a PDF on Mac:
Adobe Acrobat software is the free, trusted, global standard software for viewing, printing, sharing, and cropping PDFs. If you already have Adobe software, then you can use it to crop the PDF.
If you have it, then you can download it to your computer, so you can easily crop PDF pages and documents. Follow the given below instructions to crop PDF in Adobe Acrobat:
- Open the file in Adobe Acrobat.
- From the Tools menu select Edit PDF.
- Choose Crop Pages from the toolbar.
- Use the rectangle tool to draw an area that will be cropped.
- Double-click inside the rectangle.
- Click OK to crop the page.
- Save the file to your Mac.
Crop a PDF on Mac with Google Chrome:
As you may already know, Google Chrome is a cross-platform web browser which is developed by Google. This browser comes with the ability to read PDF documents and, also can Crop your PDF documents. Want to know how?
Follow the given below steps to do Crop a PDF with Google Chrome:
- Open the PDF in the Google Chrome.
- Click on the print button at the top right of the window.
- It will bring up the print window.
- Then select Save as PDF in the Destination option.
- Set the pages you want to cut from the original document, and click Save.
- You can find your new document in the download folder.
The bottom line:
It is sometimes pretty essential to Crop a PDF if you want to cut out some private data and information from it. It is not as easy as it sounds to Crop a PDF without the right tool and process.
But, it can be easy if you use the right process to Crop a PDF. If you want some incredible features and editing skills, then you can use any PDF editor, in which you can Crop the PDF and use other features.
But, if you don’t want to download any software, then you can use other methods to crop a PDF like Preview or Adobe Acrobat, which are free, simple, and easy to use.
If you don’t have much time and have to Crop a PDF urgently, then you can even use the Screenshot feature, it must be the quickest way out there. You can use whatever method to Crop a PDF from this guide.
Even beginners can learn and follow the process from this article. If you have found this guide relatable, then do share it with others. Thanks for reading!!