Shrink a PDF until it fits — set a target like 100 KB and the tool finds the best quality that stays under it. Your file is compressed in the browser and never uploaded.
Strong and target modes redraw each page as an image: the file gets much smaller, but the text stops being selectable and searchable.
🔒 This tool runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter or upload is sent to our servers.
How to use the Compress PDF
- Drop in the PDF you need to shrink. It is opened in your browser, not uploaded.
- Choose a target size — 100 KB and 200 KB are the usual upload limits — or pick a quality preset instead.
- Press Compress. The tool tries progressively stronger settings until the file fits, then shows you the result before you download it.
About this tool
Most oversized PDFs are oversized because of the images inside them: a scanned page or a photo pasted into a report is often stored at far higher resolution than anyone will ever look at. Compressing a PDF means re-encoding that image data at a sensible resolution and quality.
Read this before you use it. The strong compression mode redraws each page as an image. The file gets dramatically smaller, and it looks the same on screen — but the text stops being text. You will not be able to select, copy or search it, and neither will anything that reads the document automatically. For a scanned document that was already a picture, you lose nothing. For a contract, a CV or anything that will be parsed by software, use the option that keeps the text intact, even though it saves far less.
When you set a target size the tool works downwards: it encodes the pages, measures the result, and steps the quality and resolution down until the file fits, keeping the best setting that does. If even the lowest setting cannot reach your target, it says so rather than handing you a file that misses it.
Frequently asked questions
How do I compress a PDF to under 100KB?
Choose “Target size” above, enter 100 KB and press Compress. The tool steps the image quality and resolution down until the result fits, and tells you the size it achieved. Very long or very detailed documents may not reach a small target at readable quality.
Does compressing a PDF lose quality?
In the strong mode, yes — pages are re-encoded as JPEG images, so fine detail and small text soften as the target gets smaller. The preview size shown after compressing tells you what you actually got. The light mode is lossless but saves much less.
Why can I no longer select the text afterwards?
Strong compression redraws every page as an image, so the text layer is gone. If you need selectable or searchable text, use the “Keep text selectable” option, which only rewrites the file structure and strips metadata.
Is there a file size limit?
Only what your device can hold in memory. Everything runs locally, so there is no upload cap and no queue, but a several-hundred-page scanned document will be slow on a phone.
Is my document uploaded?
No. The PDF is opened, re-rendered and rebuilt entirely inside your browser using pdf.js and pdf-lib. Nothing is transmitted, so confidential documents stay on your machine.