Compress PDF
Re-renders every page as an adjustable-density JPEG and rebuilds the document, cutting size by 50-90% while rasterizing the text layer. Suited for optimizing scanned and image-heavy PDFs for delivery.
Drag files here or click to upload (multiple files supported)
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How to compress PDF
- 1Upload your PDF file by dragging, clicking, or pasting.
- 2Adjust quality settings if needed.
- 3Click 'Convert Now' and wait for the conversion to complete.
- 4Download your converted PDF file.
About PDF compression
PDF bloat comes mainly from embedded high-resolution images — phone scans often exceed 300 DPI per page, far beyond what screen reading needs; redundant font subsets, thumbnails and metadata contribute too. For scanned and image-heavy documents, page images account for over 90% of total size and offer the most headroom.
This tool re-renders every page as a JPEG at a density that follows the quality slider (73-150 DPI), then embeds the images into a new document with physical page dimensions unchanged. Typical savings run 50-90%: a 20MB scanned contract usually drops to 2-4MB. Note that the output is a bitmap-based PDF — text is no longer selectable and vector graphics are rasterized, identical to a clean scan.
Suited for email attachment limits, form upload caps and archive slimming. Documents up to 50 pages process through the async queue with live progress. If the document must keep a searchable text layer, this tool is not appropriate; already-compressed PDFs gain little and may even grow.
FAQ about Compress PDF
Can text still be selected after compressing a PDF?
No. Every page of the output is a bitmap image — text ceases to be a selectable layer, so search and copy stop working, exactly like a scanned document. Do not use this tool when the text layer must be preserved.
How does the quality slider affect the result?
The quality parameter (1-100) maps to a rendering density of 73-150 DPI plus JPEG encoding quality. Lower values mean smaller files and softer text edges; the default 80 corresponds to roughly 134 DPI, balancing on-screen readability against size.
Why did my PDF get bigger after compression?
If the source already consists of low-resolution bitmaps or is highly compressed, re-rendering and JPEG encoding can add data and increase size. Text-and-vector PDFs also grow when rasterized. Such files are not suited to this tool.
What are the page and size limits?
Up to 50MB and 50 pages per file. Page-by-page re-rendering is compute-intensive, so documents run through the async queue with live progress — keep the page open until it finishes.