Pathine

Compress PDF to 500 KB

Squeeze a PDF under 500 KB without touching its text.

PDF Free · no signup Runs on your device
Compress PDF to 500 KB Nothing leaves this device

Drop a PDF here

Or choose a file. It is opened and rewritten on your device and never uploaded. Text is never touched — only the images inside.

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Requirements

    Your PDF is opened and rewritten in this browser. It is never uploaded, and nothing about it is stored.

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    About the Pathine Compress PDF to 500 KB

    Half a megabyte is the limit application portals reach for when they expect a CV or a certificate rather than a photo album. It is enough for a legible multi-page scan and not enough for anything a scanner produces by default.

    The images inside the document are re-encoded at the highest setting that lands under 500 KB; the text is left exactly as it was. If the document is already small enough it comes back untouched.


    When you'd reach for it

    Uploading a CV with a scanned certificate attached

    The CV itself is a few kilobytes. The scanned qualification behind it is what breaks the limit.

    A portal that accepts several documents

    When each attachment is capped separately, 500 KB each is a common allowance.

    Sending a document over a slow connection

    A 20 MB upload over a phone tether is a genuinely long wait; the same document at 500 KB is instant.


    How to use it

    1. Drop the PDF in

      Drag a file onto the page or choose one. It is opened on your device and never sent anywhere.

    2. Read the report

      You see the original size, the target, and what the document came out at. Text, fonts and vector artwork are never touched — only the images inside are re-encoded.

    3. Download it

      If the target cannot be reached without destroying the document, you are told how small it can honestly go rather than handed a rasterised page.


    Common questions

    How much quality will the scans lose?

    The tool tries print quality first, then works down only as far as it must. A typical two- or three-page scan reaches 500 KB at a setting that still looks clean on screen. What suffers first is fine detail at high zoom.

    Does the page count matter?

    A great deal. The budget is for the whole document, so ten scanned pages have to share what one page would have to itself. Long scanned documents are the case where this limit becomes hard.

    Will the layout change?

    No. Nothing moves, no page is resized, and no font is substituted. Images are replaced with smaller versions of themselves in exactly the same positions.

    Is my document sent anywhere?

    No. It is opened and rewritten in your browser by a PDF library running on this page. For a document that is often someone's CV or ID, that seemed worth building properly.

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