A free Windows app that watches your plot folders and trims the white margin off every new PDF automatically. Point it at a folder, carry on working. It runs quietly in the background and never uploads a thing.
No licence key, no time limit. The email box is optional and only used to send you the link and let you know about updates. Prefer nothing installed? Use the browser version instead.
When you plot a drawing to PDF, the sheet almost always carries a wide band of white around the frame. Fixing it by hand means opening each file and drawing a crop box; fixing it in AutoCAD means redefining the plot window every time. This app removes the step entirely: it watches the folder your plotter writes to and, the moment a new PDF lands, trims it to the drawing's own content boundary plus whatever margin you choose.
It was built for our own drafting team at Docuex, where we process large-format drawings every day, and it is the same crop engine as our browser-based PDF crop tool, packaged to run unattended.
+ Add as new, name the project and browse to the folder your plots go to. Set the margin and whether to keep or overwrite the original.Save & start watcher. It runs in the background with no window. Plot a drawing and the cropped PDF appears by itself.| File | DocuexPDFAutoCrop-Setup-1.0.0.exe |
|---|---|
| Version | 1.0.0 |
| Size | 31 MB |
| Requires | Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit. Nothing else — Python and all libraries are bundled. |
| Installs to | %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Docuex\PDF Auto-Crop (per user, no admin rights) |
| Settings kept in | %LOCALAPPDATA%\Docuex\PDFAutoCrop |
| Licence | Free to use, including commercially. No warranty. |
SHA-256 checksum of the installer — you can check this on VirusTotal or with Get-FileHash in PowerShell before running it:
Install the app, point it at the folder your PDF plotter writes to, and start the watcher. Every new plot dropped into that folder is cropped to its drawing content automatically, with no clicks. You can watch several folders at once, each with its own margin and output setting.
Yes. No sign-up, no licence key, no time limit, no watermark. We are a CAD conversion company and built this for our own drafting team. Releasing it costs us nothing and introduces people to what we do — if you ever need paper drawings turned into editable CAD, you will already know us.
No. Everything happens on your PC and the application has no upload function at all. It works with no internet connection, which makes it safe for confidential, NDA and commercially sensitive drawings.
Yes, and this matters more than it sounds. AutoCAD commonly writes plots with a 90° or 270° rotation flag. If a tool ignores that, the crop is applied sideways and the title block gets cut off. Here the crop is calculated in unrotated space and the rotation restored afterwards, so the sheet stays the right way up and nothing is lost.
No. Each cropped PDF is stamped with a marker in its own metadata, so restarting the watcher, rebooting, or moving files between folders never causes a re-crop. Every crop also starts from the full sheet, so repeated runs cannot shrink a file progressively.
Yes, and that is the default. Each project can write drawing_cropped.pdf alongside the original, put results in a Cropped\ sub-folder, or overwrite the original in place — your choice, per project.
Because it is not code-signed yet, and generic heuristics flag unsigned installers that create a startup entry. It is an ordinary Inno Setup installer containing a Python application. Verify the SHA-256 checksum published above against VirusTotal if you would like to check it independently before installing.
It works, but there is usually little to trim: on an image-only PDF the content boundary is the edge of the scan itself, so cropping mostly removes the page background. For scans, OCR or deskew them first, or use our large format scanning service, which delivers already-cropped output.
Yes — our browser-based PDF crop tool does the same content-aware crop by drag and drop, entirely inside your browser. The desktop app exists for when you would rather not touch it at all.
Not at the moment. The crop engine itself is cross-platform, but the watcher and installer are Windows-specific, and nearly all large-format plotting happens on Windows. If enough people ask, we will look at it — do get in touch.
Docuex converts paper drawings, scans and PDFs into fully editable DWG, DXF and ArchiCAD files — manually drafted, not auto-traced. If a cropped PDF is only your first step, we can take it the rest of the way.