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New in PDF Tools: Crop, Redact, and Password-Protect a PDF
Three requests kept coming up: trim a page's margins, cover sensitive content before sharing, and lock a file with a password. All three just shipped. Here's exactly what each one does, with real usage examples, so you know what to expect the first time you try them.
Crop PDF: trim margins with a preset or custom values
Short answer: Open the Crop tab, pick a quick preset (trim 10pt, 0.5in, or 1in from every side) or enter custom top/bottom/left/right margins in points, then click "Crop PDF" to trim every page's visible area at once.
Say you scanned a stack of receipts and each one came out with a wide, useless white border around a small strip of printed text. Instead of exporting every page as an image and cropping it by hand in an editor, you can now upload the PDF straight into the Crop tab, choose "Trim 0.5in (36pt)" from the presets, and every page gets the same trim applied in one click. If a document needs different amounts on each side — say a wider bottom margin because of a footer you want to keep — the four custom fields (top, bottom, left, right, all in points, where 72pt equals 1 inch) let you dial in exactly that.
It's worth understanding what cropping actually changes: it adjusts the page's visible boundary, not the underlying content stream. In practice that means the trimmed area simply stops being shown or printed — the page reads as smaller and tighter — without deleting or altering anything else on the page.
Redact PDF: draw a permanent black box over sensitive content
Short answer: Open the Redact tab, load the page you want to work on, click and drag directly on the page preview to draw one or more black boxes over anything sensitive, then click "Apply redactions & download" to bake them permanently into the exported PDF.
This is the feature that guide readers asked about most directly: a real black-box cover, not a watermark used as a stand-in. Picture an old lease agreement you want to share as a reference with a friend, but it still shows your bank account number in a payment clause. Load that page in the Redact tab, drag a box directly over the account number, repeat for any other page that needs one, and click "Apply redactions & download." The tool draws an opaque rectangle directly onto that page's rendered content in the exported file — it isn't a semi-transparent overlay sitting on top, it's baked in.
One caveat worth repeating clearly, because it matters for anything genuinely sensitive: the redaction covers the page's visible content, but it doesn't scrub every trace from the document's unrendered metadata layer. For a document with real stakes, run the redacted file through the Compress tool afterward as a second pass — it rebuilds the PDF from scratch and drops unused internal objects and metadata, which reduces what might otherwise linger unseen.
Protect PDF: add a password required to open the file
Short answer: Open the Protect tab, upload your PDF, set a password, and the file is encrypted directly in your browser so that password is required the next time anyone tries to open it.
This one closes a gap that came up constantly: finishing every other edit — merging a set of files, adding page numbers, watermarking a draft — and then having nowhere to add a password before sending the result somewhere it shouldn't be opened by just anyone. Say you've merged three internal reports into one PDF for a partner company; before it leaves your outbox, running it through Protect PDF with a shared password means an accidental forward doesn't hand the whole document to someone outside the loop.
Because the password is one you choose yourself and the encryption happens locally, there's no recovery mechanism built in if it's lost — treat the password the same way you'd treat any other credential you're responsible for keeping track of.
Using all three together, in the right order
Short answer: Crop first, then redact, then protect last — since each tab processes one uploaded file at a time, download the result of each step and feed it into the next, so the password-locked file is the very last thing you save.
These three tools weren't built to run in a single pass on one screen — each is its own tab working on whatever file you hand it. That's fine as long as you chain them in a sensible order. Trim margins first while the page layout is still simple to reason about, then redact anything sensitive on the cropped result, and finish by adding a password to that redacted file. Doing it in the reverse order — protecting first — just means you'd need the password again to open the file for the next step, which is extra friction for no benefit.
Illustrative example only — your own margins, box placement, and password will vary
| Step | Tab used | What happens to the file |
|---|
| 1 | Crop | Excess margin trimmed from every page |
| 2 | Redact | Sensitive line permanently covered with a black box |
| 3 | Protect | Password required to open the finished file |
Good to know: Cropping, redacting, and protecting all run with the open-source pdf-lib library directly in your browser, the same way merging and watermarking always have. Files are never uploaded to a server at any step.
Frequently asked questions
Does the new redaction feature actually remove the hidden text, or just cover it visually?
It permanently draws an opaque black rectangle directly onto the page content in the exported PDF, so nothing can be seen or extracted from underneath that box in the finished file's visible content. What it doesn't do is scrub every trace from the document's unrendered metadata layer, so for maximum safety on highly sensitive files, also run the result through the Compress tool afterward, which rebuilds the file and drops unused metadata objects.
What password does Protect PDF add, and can it be removed later?
You choose the password yourself when you use the 'Protect' tab; the tool encrypts the file directly in your browser so that password is required to open it afterward. Because the encryption and the password are entirely under your control, whether it can be removed later depends on whether you or the recipient still knows the password — there's no separate master key or recovery path, so keep the password somewhere safe.
Does cropping a PDF delete the trimmed part of the page permanently?
No. Cropping in the Crop tab changes the page's visible boundary (its crop box) rather than deleting any underlying content, so the page's original content stream is untouched. In everyday viewers and printers this means the trimmed margin simply won't display or print, which is what most people mean by 'cropping,' but it isn't a destructive edit at the data level the way deleting a page is.
Can I combine cropping, redacting, and password-protecting on the same PDF?
Yes, but run them as separate steps in sequence rather than all at once, since each tab works on one uploaded file at a time. A practical order is to crop first, download that result, upload it again to redact any sensitive boxes, download again, then finish by uploading that file to Protect PDF and adding a password last — so the password-protected file is the very last thing you download and share.
Why would I crop a PDF instead of just rotating or resizing it?
Rotating fixes orientation, not size — a sideways-scanned page that's also full of excess white margin still has that margin after rotating. Cropping is specifically for trimming the visible edges: for example, a scanned receipt with 2 inches of blank paper around a 4-inch strip of text benefits from trimming the margins down with the Crop tab, so the page reads as mostly content instead of mostly empty space, without touching rotation or page order at all.
Related guides
A note on this guide: This article is provided for general, informational purposes to help you use these features effectively. It is not legal or security advice regarding redaction completeness, encryption strength, or compliance requirements for your specific documents — for files with real legal or confidentiality stakes, consult a qualified professional or a purpose-built compliance tool.