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Compress PDF

Make a PDF fit a size limit like 1 MB, 500 KB or 100 KB by shrinking its images, with the text still selectable. Nothing is uploaded.

  • Runs in your browser
  • Nothing is uploaded
  • Free, no sign-up

or drop it here. Up to 100 MB. Nothing is uploaded.

The PDF will be at most 1,000,000 bytes.

How it works

Forms and email often take PDFs only up to a set size, like 1 MB or 200 KB. Pick the size, then choose your PDF. Most of a big PDF is usually photos or scanned pages, so the page saves each image again as a JPEG at the highest quality that lets the whole file fit, sharing the space between the images by their size. If fairly low quality is still too big, images are made smaller in pixels too, but never below about 800 pixels on their longest side, where a scanned page stops being readable.

Everything else stays as it was: text, fonts, links, bookmarks, form fields and the document's details. The file is also tidied without loss, dropping leftovers from earlier edits and compressing parts stored uncompressed. If the PDF already fits, you get the original back unchanged.

When even the smallest images aren't enough, you can flatten the pages instead: each page is drawn as a picture, as a PDF reader shows it, and the pictures are made as sharp as the size allows. That reaches much smaller sizes, but the text can no longer be selected, searched or copied, links and forms stop working, and bookmarks and attached files are left out, so the page asks first.

Here 1 KB means 1,000 bytes and 1 MB 1,000,000 bytes; a file under the limit counted this way is also under it on sites that count 1,024. Need to put PDFs together first? Use Merge PDF, or JPG to PDF for photos of documents.

Questions

How do I compress a PDF to under 1 MB?

Choose the PDF and leave the size at 1 MB, or pick 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB or type your own. The page makes the PDF's images smaller until the whole file fits, then shows the new size before you download it. Nothing is uploaded.

Will compressing my PDF make the text blurry?

No. Text, fonts and drawings are kept exactly as they are and stay sharp and selectable; only photos and scanned pages are saved again with stronger JPEG compression, at the highest quality that fits. Only if you choose to flatten the pages does the text become part of a picture.

Why can't my PDF be made smaller?

A PDF that is mostly text, fonts and drawings has little to remove, so it shrinks only a little. The page says when that is the case, and offers to flatten the pages into images, which reaches much smaller sizes but makes the text unselectable.

Is it safe to compress a PDF online?

Here the PDF never leaves your device: your browser reads and compresses it, and the page works offline once loaded. That suits ID scans, contracts and payslips. A PDF locked with a password asks for it, and the password stays on the page.

Limits

Opens one PDF of up to 100 MB at a time. Images stored as JBIG2, JPEG 2000 or CCITT fax, in CMYK or other print colours, and images used as masks are left as they are, as are images over 50 megapixels. Fonts aren't made smaller. Saving images again removes their colour profiles, so colours can look slightly different.

Flattening draws up to 200 pages, at 150 DPI before any shrinking. A digitally signed PDF no longer shows as signed after any change, including this one. Damaged PDFs that your PDF reader repairs on the fly may not open here.

Privacy

This tool runs entirely in your browser. The files you open and what you type are never sent to a server, and nothing is stored after you close the page. See the privacy page.

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