Compress PDF
Reduce PDF size locally. Raster mode re-renders pages; lossless mode keeps text and re-packs the file.
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About Compress PDF
PDFs get rejected for size constantly. Gmail stops at twenty five megabytes, court filing portals often cap at ten, job sites want a resume under two, and government forms sometimes insist on a few hundred kilobytes.
Almost all of that weight is images. Text, fonts and vector graphics are tiny; a single photograph at full camera resolution can be several megabytes on its own, and a scanned page is a photograph. That is why a twenty page text report is small and a three page scan is enormous.
So compression here targets the images and leaves everything else alone. There are two ways to reduce PDF size. Quality mode applies a fixed level and is fast. Target size mode iterates, testing progressively stronger settings until the file fits the size you asked for, which is what you want when a portal has given you a hard number.
The trade off is real and worth stating plainly. Reducing image quality is what makes the file smaller, so there is a point past which scanned text starts to look soft. Documents that are mostly text will barely shrink, because there was never much to remove. If your PDF is large but has no images, Optimize PDF does a structural clean up instead.
How to compress pdf
- Load your PDF
Drop the file in. Nothing is uploaded.
- Choose a mode
Pick a quality level, or enter the exact target size the portal demands.
- Compress
In target mode the tool tests settings until the file fits, then reports what it achieved.
- Download
Check a page or two before sending, particularly if the document is a scan.
Related tasks
Guides for the specific jobs people bring to this tool. Each one opens the same tool with the right settings.
Frequently asked questions
Why is my PDF so large?
Almost always embedded images. A page scanned at high resolution can be several megabytes on its own, while a page of text is a few kilobytes. Check whether your document is a scan before expecting large savings from text.
How do I compress a PDF offline?
This page already works offline. Load it once, then install it from your browser or keep the tab open, and compression continues with no connection. Other online compressors answer this by offering a desktop download, because their compression runs on a server.
Will compression blur my text?
Not for real text. Text and vector graphics are left untouched, so they stay perfectly sharp. Scanned documents are the exception, because there the text is part of an image and does soften as compression increases.
My PDF barely got smaller. Why?
It probably has few or no images, so there was little to compress. Try Optimize PDF, which removes unused objects and repacks the file structure without touching quality.
Is there a file size limit?
None imposed. Compression runs in your device's memory, so the limit is your own hardware rather than a plan tier.