PDF Compressor
Make a PDF small enough to upload without sending it to anyone. Type the ceiling you were given — 200 KB for a form, 1 MB for an attachment — and each page is re-drawn and re-encoded until the whole file fits under it. The work happens in this tab; the original never leaves your machine.
100% private — everything runs in your browser, nothing is ever uploaded.
What this tool does
A visa application form says 200 KB maximum, an HR portal caps attachments at 1 MB, and the PDF you have is 4.7 MB. Guessing a quality setting and checking the result by hand is tedious, which is why this tool works backwards from the number you were given: type the ceiling and each page is re-drawn and re-encoded until the whole file fits under it. A Quality mode is also available when you would rather balance readability against size yourself. It is built for image-heavy PDFs such as scanned forms, portfolios and exported slide decks, where most of the weight comes from embedded pictures rather than from the text. The before and after sizes are displayed when it finishes, so you know whether the target was actually met before downloading.
How to use it in three steps
- Drop the PDF onto the box. Its name and current size appear immediately, which tells you how far you have to go.
- Leave the mode on Target size and type the ceiling you were given, such as 200 KB or 1 MB. Switch to Quality instead if you prefer to control the trade-off manually.
- Press Compress. Compare the before-and-after figures shown on screen, then download the smaller copy. Open it once to confirm small print is still legible before submitting it. Zoom into the smallest print once after downloading, since that is where aggressive re-encoding shows first.
Questions people ask
What if the file cannot reach my target size?
A very large or image-dense document can have a floor below which further reduction would make pages unreadable. The tool shows the achieved size rather than claiming success, so you can decide whether to lower the page count, split the file, or accept a larger attachment.
Will the text stay selectable?
Re-encoding targets the embedded images that account for most of the bytes. Text-heavy PDFs with few images have little to gain, and the tool reports the real reduction instead of padding the result with meaningless changes.
Is this the same as the image compressor?
No. The image compressor works on JPG, PNG and WebP files individually; this tool takes a complete PDF, works page by page, and produces another PDF. Use it after a scan or a slide export has already been assembled.
Should I compress a PDF that is mostly text?
There is little to gain. Text already occupies very few bytes, and re-drawing it can only trade readability for a negligible saving. This tool is aimed at documents whose weight comes from scanned pages, photographs or exported slide images; check the reported reduction before keeping the smaller copy.
Privacy: Pages are re-drawn and re-encoded inside your browser tab and the smaller PDF is written to your device; no page image or document content is ever transmitted to a server.
How to use it
- Drop your PDF onto the box above, or click to choose it. The file name and its size appear straight away.
- Leave the mode on Target size and type the ceiling you need — 100, 200, 500 KB, 1 MB. Or switch to Quality and pick the level yourself.
- Press Compress. The before-and-after sizes are shown when it finishes, then download the smaller copy.
Why it stays private
Every page is read with pdf.js, drawn onto a canvas and re-encoded as a JPEG that your browser produces in memory, and the new PDF is assembled byte by byte in this tab. There is no upload step in the code at all. The documents people need to shrink — tenancy agreements, medical letters, scanned ID pages — are exactly the ones that should never sit on a stranger's server, and here they never touch a network.
Questions
How do I compress a PDF to exactly 200 KB?
Leave the mode on Target size, type 200 into the box, and press Compress. The tool divides your ceiling between the pages, then searches each page for the highest quality that fits under its share — so you get the best-looking file that stays under 200 KB, rather than one fixed setting that may miss. The same works for 100 KB, 500 KB or 1 MB: type the number you were given.
Will the text still be selectable after compressing?
No. Compressing here re-draws each page as a picture, which is the honest price of shrinking a file inside a browser: the page looks the same, but the words are part of the image now. Keep the original for editing and archiving — the compressed copy is the one you send or upload. If what you need is an editable version, PDF to Word rebuilds the text instead.
How much smaller will my PDF get?
It depends what is inside. Scanned documents — contracts, certificates, anything photographed or fed through a scanner — are stored as large pictures and usually shrink by 70–90%. A PDF that is already plain exported text is often only a few hundred kilobytes to begin with, and a target below that may be unreachable; when the file cannot go lower, the tool hands back the smallest version it managed rather than failing silently.
Is there a page limit or a file size limit?
None imposed by us, because nothing is sent to us — the ceiling is your own machine's memory, which in practice means documents of a few hundred pages are fine. One thing does stop it: a password-protected PDF, which must be unlocked first. Very large pages are drawn at a reduced resolution to stay inside the browser's canvas limits.
Is my document uploaded anywhere?
No. The reading, the re-encoding and the writing of the new file all happen inside this tab — you can watch the Network panel of your browser's developer tools and you will not see a single request carrying your document. That is the whole reason the tool can be instant and free: there is no server to pay for because there is no server in the path.