Compress PDF

Make a PDF smaller without sending it anywhere. Choose an exact size, or keep the text real text.

0 uploads
No limits
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Works offline

Two ways to make a PDF smaller, and they are not interchangeable

Almost every "compress PDF" service does one thing: it turns each page into a photograph and saves the photograph. That works spectacularly well on scans and it quietly destroys something on everything else. This tool offers both approaches and tells you which one you are getting.

Balanced — the big saving

Each page is rendered at the resolution you choose and re-encoded as a JPEG, then the pages are assembled into a new document. A scanned contract that arrived as 8 MB commonly comes back under 300 KB. The catch is stated plainly on the result screen: the text is now an image. It looks identical and prints identically, but it cannot be selected, copied or searched, and screen-reader users get nothing at all.

That trade is right for a scan you are emailing to a portal with a size cap. It is wrong for a CV going into an applicant tracking system, for anything being filed legally, or for a document that has to meet an accessibility requirement.

Lossless-lite — the text survives

The document is rebuilt without its unused objects and orphaned resources, and written with object streams. No image is re-encoded, so every character stays a character. The saving is small and honest: often 3–15%, and sometimes almost nothing — which tells you the file was already efficient, not that the tool failed.

Hitting an exact number

When a portal says "maximum 200 KB", a percentage slider is not much help. Give the tool the number instead: it renders, measures, adjusts the JPEG quality, and drops the resolution a step only when quality alone cannot get there. The result lands under your budget rather than near it — being 3 KB over is the same as being 3 MB over to an upload form.

Because every attempt re-renders the whole document, this takes longer than the image compressor does. The progress line shows which pass it is on and at what resolution.

Large documents

Pages are processed one at a time and each page's canvas is released before the next one is created, so a two-hundred-page file uses roughly as much memory as a two-page one. It takes longer, but it does not fall over — which is the failure mode of tools that load everything at once.

How it works

01Add your PDFDrop it on the page, click to choose, or paste it. Several at once is fine.
02Pick a modeBalanced for the big savings, Lossless-lite when the text has to stay real text.
03Set a size or a qualityGive it a budget in KB and it searches for the setting that lands under your number.
04DownloadOne file, or the whole batch as a zip assembled on your device.

Questions people actually ask

Will the text still be selectable afterwards?

In Balanced mode, no — and this is the one thing worth understanding before you compress anything important. Balanced renders each page as a picture, which is where the big savings come from, but the text stops being text: it cannot be selected, copied, searched or read by a screen reader. Lossless-lite keeps the text intact and saves much less. The tool says which mode it used on every result.

How much smaller will my PDF get?

A scanned document in Balanced mode typically drops by 70–95%, because scans are photographs of paper and photographs compress. A PDF that is already mostly text often barely moves in Lossless-lite — usually 3–15% — because there is little waste to remove. If Lossless-lite saves almost nothing, that is a sign the file is already efficient rather than a sign the tool failed.

Why does it take longer than compressing an image?

Hitting an exact size means trying a setting, measuring the result and adjusting. For an image each attempt is one re-encode; for a PDF each attempt re-renders every page. A thirty-page document therefore takes a handful of seconds rather than a fraction of one, and the progress line tells you which pass it is on.

What resolution should I choose?

144 dpi is the default and suits anything that will be read on a screen. Drop to 96 dpi when the file has to be very small and nobody will print it. Use 200 dpi when the document contains small print, a stamp, or fine detail someone has to be able to read — the file will be larger, which is the point.

My PDF is password-protected and will not open.

A PDF encrypted with an open password cannot be read without it, and this tool deliberately does not attempt to work around that. Open the file with its password in any PDF reader, save an unlocked copy, and compress that.

Is my document uploaded anywhere?

No. The pages are rendered and re-encoded by your own browser, in a background thread. Open the Network tab in your developer tools and compress something — no request carries the file. That matters more for PDFs than for most things, because PDFs are contracts, medical records and bank statements.