Shrink a PDF enough to email it, without wrecking the text.
The photos and scans inside get recompressed; the text is left exactly as it is. Nothing is uploaded — the document never leaves this device.
Compressing…
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Your PDF is opened and rewritten in this browser tab. It is never uploaded.
Makes a PDF smaller by recompressing the pictures inside it, which is almost always where the weight is. A photo from a phone or a scan at 600dpi carries far more detail than a page a few inches wide can show, so most of those bytes were never going to be visible.
The text is not touched. Not re-rendered, not flattened, not turned into a picture — the instructions that draw your words come out of this byte for byte. The document still selects, searches and copies exactly as it did, and it still prints sharp at any size. Tools that compress a PDF by turning each page into one big image get smaller files and destroy all of that.
Everything happens in this browser tab. The file is not uploaded, which for a contract, a medical record or a passport scan is the whole point — those are exactly the documents people need to shrink and exactly the ones they should not be posting to a stranger's server.
The usual limit is 25MB and the usual culprit is three photographs. Most documents drop below it on the first try, and you can see the number before you send anything.
Job applications, insurance claims, visa portals and council forms all cap the size, often at something unhelpful like 2MB. Try the smallest setting — the text stays crisp because it was never an image to begin with.
Scanners default to a resolution meant for archiving. A twenty page scan can arrive at 80MB and look identical at a fraction of it.
Slides exported to PDF keep every image at full resolution, including the ones cropped down to a thumbnail. Those are the biggest single win here.
It is read here, in the page. There is no upload and no queue, so it starts immediately and works offline.
Balanced runs automatically and tells you the before and after. For most documents that is the end of it.
Smallest for an upload form with a hard limit; Best quality when the document is going to be printed. Switching recompresses from the original every time, so you can move between them freely without stacking up damage.
You get a normal PDF that opens anywhere. If nothing could be saved, the tool says so and gives you your original back rather than a file that is somehow bigger.
No, and not in the sense of "probably not" — text is not part of what gets compressed. Only the images inside the document are re-encoded. The drawing instructions for your words are copied across unchanged, so text stays vector-sharp at any zoom and still selects and searches. This is the main way this differs from tools that flatten each page to a picture.
It depends entirely on what is inside. A document full of photographs or scans typically loses 60–90%. A document that is mostly text has almost nothing to give and will barely move — there were never many bytes there to remove. The tool tells you which case you are in rather than pretending.
No. It is opened and rewritten in this browser tab, and never sent. You can watch the network tab, or turn off your wifi after the page loads and it will still work.
You can, and it will decline to do it again. Once the images are at the target size a second pass has nothing meaningful left to remove, so it returns the file unchanged instead of putting your pictures through another round of loss for a fraction of a percent.
Most likely it is text and vector graphics, with no large images to work on — that file is already about as small as a PDF gets. It can also happen with scans stored in specialised formats for black-and-white pages, which are already the most efficient way to hold that content and which this tool leaves alone on purpose.
No. An encrypted document cannot be opened without the password, and the tool will say so instead of producing a damaged file. Remove the password in your PDF reader first, then compress.
Form fields and annotations are carried across. A digital signature is a different matter: it certifies the exact bytes of the file, so any change to the document — by any tool — invalidates it. If your PDF is signed, compress before it is signed rather than after.