Make a PDF smaller — and see the quality before you commit

Compression is where online PDF tools most often disappoint. The two complaints people repeat are that the result is illegible, or that it's somehow bigger than the original — and in both cases you only find out after downloading it.

So this one shows you a sample page at the current and proposed settings side by side, before you commit. You can also name a target size — email attachment limits and government upload forms are where this actually matters — and let it find the quality setting that gets there.

The savings come from re-encoding the images inside the document and dropping unused objects. If the file is already well optimised, you'll be told so and handed back your original rather than a slightly worse copy of it.

What this does — and what it doesn't

  • Expect large savings on scanned and image-heavy documents, and very little on text-only ones — there simply isn't much to remove from a text PDF.
  • We never rasterize pages to hit a size target. Turning text into a picture makes it unsearchable, unselectable and inaccessible, and on text-heavy documents it usually makes the file bigger, not smaller.
  • Fonts already embedded in the document can't be re-subset by any permissively-licensed browser library, so that avenue of savings isn't available to us. Desktop tools using Ghostscript will beat us on some files.

Next steps

Compress PDF — frequently asked questions

How much smaller will my file get?
It depends entirely on what's inside. Scanned documents and slide decks full of photos commonly drop by half or more. A text-only report might not shrink at all, because there's nothing redundant in it. We show you the estimate before you commit.
Will the text still be selectable?
Yes. We never convert pages to images. Text stays text, so it remains searchable, selectable and accessible to screen readers.
Can I compress to a specific size, like 100 KB?
You can set a target and we'll search for the image quality that reaches it. If the target isn't reachable without destroying the document, we'll tell you what the realistic floor is instead of quietly returning something unusable.
What if my PDF is already optimised?
Then you get your original file back, with a note saying so. Handing you a re-encoded file that's marginally worse and no smaller would be pointless.
Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?
No. Every operation runs in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly — the file never leaves your device. You can verify it: load the page, disconnect from the internet, and the tool still works. There is no upload endpoint to send it to.

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