Compress PDF
Make a PDF small enough to email, without uploading it anywhere.
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PDF · one file
Your file never leaves your browser during processing
How it works
To make a PDF smaller, drop it onto this page and choose between a lossless re-save that keeps the text selectable and a rasterise mode that shrinks scanned documents dramatically at the cost of turning their text into an image.
Most PDFs that are too big to send are big for one reason: the images inside them. A scanned contract or a slide deck full of screenshots carries far more image data than it needs, and the text around it contributes almost nothing to the file size.
This tool offers two genuinely different methods, because a browser cannot do what a server-side compressor does. Lossless cleanup rewrites the file structure, packs objects more efficiently, and strips metadata. Everything stays exactly as it was — text remains selectable, links keep working, the document stays accessible to screen readers — but the saving is modest, often between nothing and a fifth of the original size.
The strong method redraws every page as a JPEG image and rebuilds the document around those pictures. On a scanned or image-heavy PDF this routinely removes 80% or more, and it is the only approach that reliably gets a large file under a mail server limit. The trade-off is real and worth understanding: once a page is a picture, the text in it cannot be selected, searched, or read aloud, and any links stop working. On a PDF that is mostly text, this method can even produce a larger file than you started with. Once a file is loaded in this mode, a preview shows the real size the first page renders to at the current resolution and quality — a live number to tune against, not a guess. The full document scales roughly with its page count from there.
Server-based compressors take a third route — re-encoding the embedded images while leaving the text layer untouched. That needs a full rewrite of the PDF content streams, which is not something the available browser libraries can do. Rather than quietly pick one method and overstate the result, both are offered here with their costs written down.
FAQ
Which method should I use?
If the PDF is a scan or full of images, use the strong method — it is the one that will actually make a difference. If it is mostly text and you need it to stay selectable and searchable, use lossless cleanup and accept the smaller saving.
Why did my file barely get smaller with lossless cleanup?
Because there was little redundancy to remove. Files produced by modern software are often already well packed. Lossless compression cannot discard picture detail, so there is a hard floor to what it can achieve.
Why did my PDF get bigger?
That happens when you use the strong method on a text-heavy document. Text stored as characters is extremely compact; the same text stored as a photograph of itself is not. Use lossless cleanup for text documents.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. Both methods run entirely in your browser, and the counter under the tool monitors network activity while your file is processed and stays at zero bytes sent.
Will the text still be searchable afterwards?
With lossless cleanup, yes. With the strong method, no — the pages become images. If searchable text matters, that is the deciding factor.