Compress a PDF
Shrink a PDF two ways: optimise losslessly, or compress hard for scanned documents.
Drop a PDF here, or click to choose one
Processed right in your browser, never uploaded to any server
What is Compress a PDF?
Compressing a PDF is not magic, and how much it shrinks depends entirely on what is inside. So this tool offers two modes and states the price of each, instead of promising a percentage it cannot know in advance.
Optimise rewrites the file more compactly: it packs small objects into a shared compressed stream and drops the slack. Nothing in the content is touched, so text stays selectable and images stay intact. On a text-heavy document exported from office software, the measured saving is often around half. But if the file was already optimised, the saving is zero, and that is the truth rather than a malfunction.
Compress hard re-renders each page as a JPEG and rebuilds the file from those. It is the only way to seriously shrink a scanned document, which is heavy because of images rather than text. The price is the text layer: no selecting, no searching, and no way back. Use it only when the document was already images.
A quick rule: files exported by Word or Excel want optimise. Files photographed or produced by a scanner want compress hard.
How to use
- Choose the PDF you want to shrink.
- Try optimise first, since it is safe and costs nothing.
- Look at the result. If it barely shrank and the document is a scan, switch to hard mode.
- In hard mode, pull the quality and resolution sliders down until the size looks right.
- Press download to save the compressed file.
Frequently asked questions
Why did my file not shrink at all?
Because it was already optimised. Most files from modern software already use compressed streams, leaving nothing to pack. If it is still large, the weight is in the images inside, and only hard mode reaches those.
How much does hard mode save?
It depends on the document and where you set the two sliders. Several times smaller is common for scans. Try quality 70 and resolution 120 first, then open the result and check it is still comfortable to read.
Can I get the text back after hard compression?
No. Once a page is an image, the text layer is gone for good. Recovering it would require optical character recognition, which is a different job. Keep your original before compressing hard.
Does it modify my original file?
No. The file on your machine is untouched; the tool builds a new one and downloads it. Everything happens in the browser, and nothing is sent anywhere.