Compress PDF
Compress a PDF to a smaller size by shrinking and recompressing its pictures and tidying its structure. Never bigger, never uploaded.
Drop the PDF to compress
It is shrunk in your browser and never uploaded.
How to use Compress PDF
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Open the PDF
Drop the PDF to shrink.
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Choose a level
Pick Light, Balanced, Strong or Max, with optional greyscale and fast web view.
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Compress and download
Press Compress PDF and download the smaller file.
About this tool
Make a PDF smaller for email, uploads and sharing. Pictures are what make most PDFs big, so the tool scales down oversized pictures and recompresses them as JPEG, and rewrites the file’s structure more compactly. Text and drawings are not touched, so they stay sharp at any zoom.
Choose Light to shrink the file without changing a single pixel, or go up to Max for the smallest result when the PDF only needs to be read on a screen. You can also turn pictures grey, and save the file for fast web view so the first page appears before the rest has downloaded.
It never returns a bigger file: if there is nothing to gain, you get the original back and are told so. Compression happens in your browser; the PDF is not uploaded. PDFs that are mostly text, or that were already compressed well, may shrink only a little.
How do I reduce the size of a PDF without uploading it?
Open the file here, pick a level and choose Compress. The work is done in your browser and you download the smaller copy. Nothing is sent to a server.
Why is my compressed PDF almost the same size?
Compression mainly helps with pictures. A PDF made of text and vector drawings, or one whose pictures are already small, has little left to save. Try a stronger level, or check whether the file is mostly scanned pages.
Will compressing make the text blurry?
No. Text and drawings are stored as shapes, not pictures, and are not changed. Only embedded pictures, such as photos and scans, are recompressed.
Which level should I choose?
Balanced suits most files and still prints well. Use Strong or Max for sending by email or sharing on screen, and Light when you want a smaller file with no visible change at all.