Compress a PDF

Most oversized PDFs are large because of the images inside them. This tool re-encodes those images at a quality level you choose and leaves the text layer untouched.

or drag and drop here

How this works, and the trade-off

This tool renders each page to an image and rebuilds the document from those images. It shrinks scanned and photo-heavy PDFs a great deal.

But it means text in the output is no longer selectable or searchable, and screen readers cannot read it. If your PDF has a real text layer — try selecting a line of text in it — consider whether that matters before compressing. If the document is a scan, its pages were already images and you lose nothing.

  • No upload

    Files are read and written on your device

  • No limits

    Any file size, as many times as you like

  • No account

    There is no sign-up anywhere on this site

Frequently asked questions

How much smaller will my file get?
It depends entirely on what is in the document. Scanned pages and photo-heavy PDFs often shrink substantially. A text-only PDF has little image data to compress, so the saving will be small — the tool reports the exact before and after size so you can decide whether to keep the result.
Will the text get blurry?
No. Text in a normal PDF is stored as vector glyph data, not pixels, and is passed through unchanged. Only raster images are re-encoded.
Is the file uploaded for processing?
No. Compression runs on your own CPU inside the browser tab. The document is never transmitted.

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