Compress PDF
Upload a PDF to reduce its file size.
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Max 20 MB total
About compressing PDF files
PDF compression works by finding redundancy, and how much exists varies enormously between documents. This tool deduplicates identical internal objects — the same font, image or resource referenced repeatedly — and drops orphaned data that no page points at any more. Files assembled by merging, exported repeatedly from design software, or generated by scanners often carry a surprising amount of this dead weight.
It is worth setting expectations honestly: a text-heavy PDF exported cleanly from Word is already close to optimal, and compressing it may save only a few percent. The dramatic reductions people remember come from documents bloated with duplicated resources. If your file is mostly high-resolution photographs, the images themselves are the size, and no lossless pass will change that much.
How to compress a PDF
- 1Upload the PDF you want to shrink.
- 2Start processing and let the file be analysed for redundant objects.
- 3Compare the reported output size against the original.
- 4Download the compressed PDF — keep your original until you have checked the result.
Limits and technical details
- Accepts a single .pdf file up to 50 MB
- Removes duplicated internal objects and orphaned resources
- Text and vector content stay selectable and sharp
- Results vary widely depending on how the source PDF was produced
Frequently asked questions
- How much smaller will my file get?
- There is no reliable single number. Documents with heavy internal duplication — merged files, repeated exports, scanner output — can shrink substantially. A lean, text-only PDF may barely change. The honest answer is to run it and compare.
- Will compression make my text blurry?
- No. Text and vector graphics are stored as instructions, not pixels, and this tool does not rasterise them. They render identically at any zoom level after compression.
- My file barely got smaller. What else can I do?
- That usually means the bulk is image data that is already efficiently encoded. Downsampling the images in the source document before exporting to PDF is the effective fix — reducing a 600 DPI scan to 200 DPI has far more impact than any post-hoc pass.
- Is compression reversible?
- The removed data is redundant, so nothing you can see is lost, but the process is not an archive you can unpack. Keep the original if you may need to edit the source later.