Squeeze a PDF under 5 MB without touching its text.
Or choose a file. It is opened and rewritten on your device and never uploaded. Text is never touched — only the images inside.
Working on your device…
Your PDF is opened and rewritten in this browser. It is never uploaded, and nothing about it is stored.
Five megabytes is a generous limit — it is what many mail systems, client portals and document management systems allow — and it is the one most people hit with a scanned document rather than a written one. A thirty-page scan at print resolution can be ten times over it while looking identical on screen.
This re-encodes the images inside the document at the highest setting that lands under 5 MB. Because the budget is large, that is usually the very first setting tried, which means print-quality images and a document nobody would guess had been touched.
Plenty of corporate mail servers still stop at 5 or 10 MB, and a scanned document clears that without effort.
Page count is what makes documents large. Thirty scanned pages at 600 dpi is a very big file for something that only needs to be read.
Document management systems commonly cap individual files around this size, and reject rather than truncate.
Drag a file onto the page or choose one. It is opened on your device and never sent anywhere.
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.
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.
Usually not. Five megabytes is enough that the tool typically settles on its best image setting — roughly 280 dpi, above what an office printer resolves — so pages look the same in print as well as on screen.
Every image has to be decoded and re-encoded in your browser, so a hundred-page scan takes a while and the progress line counts through them. Nothing is uploaded, which is why the work happens on your machine rather than a server's.
Because there was nothing to take. A document that is mostly text, or whose images someone already optimised, has no slack in it — and the tool leaves any image where re-encoding would save less than ten percent, since a second generation of JPEG loss for a rounding error is not a trade worth making.
Try one of the smaller targets — 2 MB or 1 MB — which push the image settings harder. Make PDF Fit takes any figure you type if none of the fixed targets is the number you need.