PDF Compressor

See the size and the page before anything is compressed.

FREE · NO SIGN-UP · RUNS ON YOUR DEVICE

Your PDFs stay on your device

Specification

PDF Compressor at a glance

How to

Questions

Almost always photographs inside it. A scan is a full-resolution picture on every page, and the page count multiplies it.

A scan has no selectable text to lose, so redraw it. A file exported from a document has text worth keeping, so rewrite it.

A file that is mostly text is already small and well packed. The keep-the-text route says so rather than pretending otherwise.

No. It is opened, drawn and rebuilt in this tab. Neither the measurement nor the result leaves your device.

Background

Two routes down. Rewriting the file keeps every word selectable. Redrawing the pages as pictures goes much further, and the text stops being text.

Resolution. A page drawn at 96 dpi holds roughly a quarter of the pixels of the same page at 200 dpi.
Photo quality. Going from 90% to 70% is usually invisible on a screen and cuts the size sharply.
Color. Black and white halves a scanned page again without hurting legibility.
What does not help: dropping metadata on its own, which is measured in kilobytes, not megabytes.

Specification of the PDF Compressor tool
Input	PDF, including scans and pages photographed with a phone.
Keeping the text	The file structure is rewritten and metadata dropped. Text, links and search are untouched.
Going much smaller	Every page is drawn as a picture at the detail and quality you choose. Best on scans.
What that costs	In the smaller route the text is part of the picture, so it cannot be selected, searched or copied.
If it comes out bigger	Your original file is what downloads instead.
Price	Free. Supported by clearly labelled ads placed outside the working area.
Account required	No.
Where it runs	In your browser tab. The file is never sent anywhere.

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