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How to Crop and Flatten a PDF for Privacy
Written and fact-checked by The EditPDF AI Team
If you are cropping a PDF specifically to keep a recipient from seeing content outside the crop area, flattening the result afterward is the step that actually removes that content rather than just hiding it from view.
Step-by-step: crop and flatten for privacy
- 1Open editpdfai.com/pdf-cropper and upload the PDF.
- 2Set the crop boundary to exclude everything you do not want visible.
- 3Enable the flatten option so the crop is burned permanently into the page rather than stored as an adjustable boundary.
- 4Download the result and confirm — by trying to adjust the crop box in a PDF editor — that the excluded content is genuinely gone, not just hidden.
When to use redaction instead
Cropping removes content outside a rectangular page boundary — useful when the sensitive material is at the edge of the page, like a margin note or a header. If the sensitive content is inside the main body of the page, PDF Redactor, which covers specific areas anywhere on the page, is the more precise tool.
Related PDF tools and guides
Core PDF tool
PDF Cropper
The core workflow is available without an account. Browser and tool-specific limits apply.
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