Compress PDF
Shrink a heavy PDF so it fits an email or upload limit. Works by re-rendering pages, so text stops being selectable — keep your original.
Drop a PDF here
or click to browse
Files are processed on your device and never uploaded.
How it works
- Drop your PDF onto the tool.
- Pick a compression level — Balanced suits email, Smallest is for screen only, Best quality stays printable.
- Click Compress, check the before-and-after sizes, and download.
Frequently asked questions
- Why does my text stop being selectable?
- Because that is how browser-based compression works. Every page is re-rendered as a photograph and those photographs are placed into a new PDF, so the file no longer contains text — it contains pictures of text. You lose selection, search, copy-paste and screen-reader access. It is a real trade, which is why the tool says so up front rather than after you download.
- My file got bigger instead of smaller. Why?
- Because it was already efficient. A text document stores compact drawing instructions — a page of text can be a few kilobytes. Turning that page into a photograph produces a JPEG of the whole sheet, which is often larger than the instructions it replaced. This method only helps documents dominated by large images or high-resolution scans. If the result is not smaller, keep your original.
- Which compression level should I choose?
- Balanced at 150 dpi is right for email and web viewing and typically cuts scanned documents by a large margin. Best quality at 220 dpi stays acceptable for printing. Smallest at 96 dpi is genuinely small but visibly soft, so use it only for something that will be read on a screen and never printed.
- Is there a file size limit?
- No imposed limit, but there is a practical one: your device’s memory. Rendering a page at 300 dpi produces a bitmap of around 25 MB before compression, and long documents mean many of them in sequence. Pages are freed as the tool goes, but a several-hundred-page file on a phone can still run out of memory. Lower the level or split the file first.
- What if I need the text to stay text?
- Then do not compress this way. Deleting pages you do not need, extracting only the section you need, or splitting a large document into parts all reduce the file size while keeping everything intact and searchable. Those are usually the better answer when the goal is just to get under an upload limit.
- Is my document uploaded to a server?
- No. The rendering and rebuilding happen entirely inside your browser and the download is produced on your device. There is no upload, no queue and no copy left anywhere — which also explains the memory limits, since your device is doing the work rather than a server.
About this tool
PDFs get too big for the same handful of reasons: a scanner saved every page at 600 dpi, someone dropped phone photos straight into a document, or a report is padded with full-page images. This tool re-renders each page at a lower resolution and rebuilds the document from those renders, which is the one approach that genuinely shrinks such files inside a browser.
The trade-off is stated plainly because it matters: the output contains pictures of your pages, not text. Selection, search, copy-paste and screen-reader access are gone, and they cannot be recovered from the compressed file. Always keep the original. For a scanned document that was already images, you lose almost nothing. For a text document, you lose a great deal — and you may not even gain size, because compact text instructions can be smaller than a photograph of the same page.
That is the honest limit of the technique, and it is worth knowing before you start. If a text-based PDF is too large, the effective fixes are structural rather than photographic: remove the pages you do not need, extract just the section you are sending, or split the file into parts. Each keeps the document fully intact and searchable while getting you under the limit — usually the real goal.
Three levels are offered. Balanced at 150 dpi is the default and handles the common case of emailing a scan. Best quality at 220 dpi remains printable. Smallest at 96 dpi is for screen-only viewing and will look soft on paper. Everything runs locally in your browser with no upload and no imposed size cap — the only ceiling is your device’s memory, since it is doing the rendering itself.