PDF Compress
Compress PDF files to reduce size. Choose compression level and download optimized PDFs.
Compression Level
Drop your PDF here
or click to browse — PDF files only
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About This Tool
Shrink PDF files that are too heavy to email or upload — scans and image-heavy documents often weigh 10-50 MB when 2 MB is accepted. This tool re-compresses the embedded images with adjustable quality, entirely in your browser, and reports the exact size before and after. Text-only PDFs barely change (their text is already efficient), while scan-heavy documents typically shrink by 60-85%.
How to Use This Tool
- Drop your PDF into the zone — the current size is displayed immediately.
- Choose a compression level: Light preserves print quality, Balanced targets email limits, Strong maximizes shrinking for screen reading.
- Start the compression; progress shows per page for long documents.
- Compare the before/after size and download the result.
- Open the output and zoom to 100% to confirm text is still crisp before deleting the original.
Advantages & Use Cases
Get a 25 MB scanned lease under a portal's 5 MB cap, slim a portfolio PDF so it opens instantly in email previews, or compress a stack of receipts before the yearly accounting upload. Students compress lecture-slide PDFs (image-heavy exports) for phone reading.
Supported Formats & Recommendations
- Scan PDFs (images of pages) compress the most; quality 60-70 keeps text legible.
- Vector/text PDFs shrink little — their content is already compact; Strong mode mostly re-encodes embedded photos.
- Keep a Light version for printing and a Strong version for sharing; the tool makes producing both quick.
How We Test This Tool
We compress a 30 MB 60-page scanned contract and a text-only report on each release: the scan must drop below 25% of original with OCR-grade legibility retained at 150% zoom, text-only files must remain functionally identical, and page count plus text extractability must be preserved.
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Helpful Resources
Frequently Asked Questions
Why didn't my text-only PDF get much smaller?
Digital PDFs store text as efficient vectors, not images — there is little to squeeze. Compression targets embedded scans and photos, which is where the megabytes hide.
Is the compressed PDF still searchable?
Yes for text-born PDFs; the text layer is untouched. For scanned documents, searchability depends on whether an OCR layer existed — it is preserved when present.
Will compression damage printing quality?
Light mode keeps 300-DPI-equivalent images and prints fine. Balanced is fine for office printers; reserve Strong for screen-only sharing.