I need to crop uneven margins on a 30-page PDF, and reviews seem mixed. Has anyone compared the crop tool ratings for ilovepdf, smallpdf, and pdf2go against actual results?
had the same thing last month on a batch of checklists. i haven’t compared those three myself. fwiw i opened the pdf in word, adjusted the margins until they looked even, and saved as a new pdf. it was tedious for 30 pages but it got the job done.
I hit this with supplier PDFs all the time. For uneven margins, I would test one awkward page in each first, because the key difference is whether it lets you set separate crop boxes per page rather than applying one crop to all 30.
I’ve used ilovepdf and smallpdf at the help desk, and honestly the ratings don’t tell you much since all three apply one crop box to every page. That’s a problem if your margins are uneven page to page. For a 30 pager I’d crop to the smallest safe area, or use PDF-XChange Editor where you can set different boxes per page range. Saved me on scanned coursepacks last semster.
Honestly never trusted “ratings” for this, they all crop margins fine for a standard batch job but uneven margins on 30 pages usually means one tool’s auto detect gets lazy halfway through.
- Keep a backup of the original before you let any site touch it, cropping is destructive if you overwrite.
- Try cropping in small batches rather than all 30 at once, easier to catch pages where the margin detection goes wrong.
Avoid trusting “auto crop all” blindly, always scroll through the result before downloading.
Ratings did not match my results much. Smallpdf was easiest for applying one crop to every page, while PDF2Go gave me better page-by-page control; iLovePDF was fine for basic uniform margins. Tip: test pages 1, 15, and 30 first. Avoid uploading anything with patient or personal data to an online cropper.