Compress PDF
Shrink a PDF that is too big to email or upload. The images inside are re-encoded at a quality you choose; the text is left alone, so it stays as crisp as it was.
Open Compress PDF
Free, no account, and your file is never uploaded.
How to compress a PDF
- 1Choose the PDF you want to make smaller.
- 2Pick how hard to compress — a lighter setting for documents you will print, a stronger one for email.
- 3Compress, check the size saved, and download.
Worth knowing
- The file never leaves your computer. Every one of these tools runs inside your browser. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no copy on a server, nothing to delete afterwards and no queue of other people’s documents next to yours.
- It is the images that shrink. In almost every oversized PDF the bulk is photographs and scans, not words. Those are re-encoded; the text layer, the fonts and the vector graphics are untouched, which is why the result stays readable at the same size.
- A text-only PDF will barely change. If a file is already just text it has nothing to squeeze. When that happens you are told the saving was negligible rather than handed a file the same size with no explanation.
- Compression is not reversible. Image quality that has been thrown away cannot be recovered from the compressed file. Keep the original if the document has to be printed at full quality later.
- Try Optimise first for a structural tidy. Optimise rewrites the file’s internal structure without touching image quality. It saves less, but it costs nothing in fidelity.
Related PDF tools
They are all in the PDF workspace, and the rest of the free tools — invoices, QR codes and file compression — need no account either.