Compress PDF
Shrink a PDF until it fits the size limit you are up against. Pick a target and the tool works out how much compression is needed. Nothing is uploaded.
- Select a PDF. The tool reads it locally and shows its page count and current size.
- Choose the maximum size you need — the presets cover the common form and email limits, or enter your own in KB.
- Click Compress PDF. It tests how much compression the target requires, then rebuilds the file and downloads it.
How this actually works — and what it costs you
Most tools are vague about this, and it matters. Compression here works by rendering each page as an image and re-encoding it as a JPEG, then rebuilding those images into a new PDF. It is the only approach a browser can take without sending your file to a server.
The consequence is straightforward: text stops being text. A page that had selectable, searchable, copyable words becomes a picture of those words. Visually it looks the same. But you cannot search it, copy from it, or have a screen reader read it.
Whether that matters depends entirely on what happens to the file next:
- Uploading to a form or portal? It makes no difference. A person or a scanner looks at the page either way.
- Emailing a document someone will read? Still fine.
- A contract, a reference document, anything you will search later? Keep the original. Compress a copy.
The tool checks your file when you select it and warns you if it contains real text, so you are never caught out by this.
What compresses well, and what doesn't
Scans compress brilliantly. A scanned document is already a photograph, so re-encoding it loses almost nothing you can see while cutting the file by 80–95%. Since scans are also what people most often need to shrink for an upload, this is the common case and it works well.
Text documents compress well but change character. A text-heavy PDF exported from Word is small in the first place because text is stored as instructions rather than pixels. Turning it into images can occasionally make it bigger at high quality settings — the tool detects this and compresses harder — but you lose the text layer.
Photo-heavy documents are the sweet spot. A PDF built from phone photos is nearly all image data and shrinks enormously with no meaningful quality loss.
Picking a realistic target
| Target | Realistic for |
|---|---|
| 20–50 KB | A single mostly-white page. Anything longer will be visibly degraded — resize or remove pages instead. |
| 100 KB | 1–3 page scans. The standard exam and government form limit. Achievable and usually still legible. More on hitting 100 KB → |
| 200–500 KB | Most upload portals. Comfortable for documents up to about ten pages with good quality retained. More on hitting 500 KB → |
| 1–2 MB | Email attachments, visa and university applications. Roomy — longer documents keep near-original quality. More on hitting 1 MB → |
What this tool does not do
Being direct about the limits, since plenty of sites are not. Desktop software and server-side services can do things a browser cannot: rewriting a PDF's internal object structure, subsetting embedded fonts, and re-encoding embedded images while keeping the text layer intact. That last one is what you would ideally want, and it needs to parse and rebuild the PDF's internals rather than re-render it.
So if you need a compressed PDF that stays searchable, this is not the right tool and no browser-based tool will be. What you get here instead is: no upload, no account, no watermark, no page limit, and a file that will pass the size check you are trying to pass.