What is compressing a PDF?
Make an oversized PDF smaller so it fits an email, upload form or archive. This tool re-renders each page to an image locally in your browser and rebuilds the PDF at an adjustable quality — especially effective for scans and image-heavy PDFs. Nothing is uploaded.
How to use it
- Select or drop in a PDF.
- Drag the quality slider (lower = smaller file).
- Compare the before/after size and click Download.
Good to know
- This approach turns pages into images, so text is no longer selectable or searchable — ideal for "view / print / send" cases.
- Text-only PDFs are already small, so compression gains are limited and may not be needed.
That -50% is the net of two opposite movements
Our five-page document goes 334.1 KB → 167.6 KB (-50%, quality 60). What happens underneath that number is not simple. Our page-extraction measurements show 331.2 KB of that file sits on page 3, which holds a photograph, while the text-only page 4 amounts to 1,397 bytes. So “compress PDF” is really re-encoding that photograph, and almost all of the saving comes from one page. In the other direction the text pages grow: this tool rasterises every page to JPEG and puts it back, so a page holding a few lines of text goes from 1,397 bytes to tens of kilobytes as an image. The consequence that matters is not size, it is that the text is gone. Afterwards those letters are pixels — not selectable, not searchable, not copyable, and invisible to a screen reader. Check it yourself: after compressing, try to drag-select a sentence. You cannot. So do not send text-only or already-OCRed PDFs through here. The case this belongs in is a file stuffed with large photographs that you just need to email for someone to glance at.