Crop a Scanned Book PDF — Remove Binding Margins and Scanner Borders
Book scans have thick borders and mirrored binding margins. Here is the per-page crop workflow that removes scanner waste without losing content.
Scanning a physical book creates PDFs with thick grey scanner borders, curved text near the spine, and significant gaps between content and page edges. Cropping removes the wasted space and makes the result usable for reading or sharing.
The specific problems with book scans
Flatbed scanners capture the book along with scanner bed borders. Left and right pages have mirrored margin requirements: the binding edge (inner margin) needs more cropping than the outer edge, and this is mirrored between left and right pages.
Per-page crop workflow for books
- Open the PDF Crop tool.
- Upload your scanned book PDF and switch to "Per page" mode.
- For odd pages (right-hand): crop more from the left (binding) edge.
- For even pages (left-hand): crop more from the right (binding) edge.
- Use the live red overlay to verify text starts cleanly at all edges.
- Download the cropped PDF.
Starting crop values
A common starting point: outer edge 8 mm, binding edge 20 mm, top 8 mm, bottom 8 mm. Adjust based on the preview until text starts cleanly at all four edges on both page types. Cropping barely reduces file size since it changes the crop box metadata, not the pixel data. Run the result through the PDF Compressor afterward for file size reduction.