Compress
Compress a PDF
Shrink a large PDF document down to a smaller file size. Pick a compression level and download — nothing is uploaded.
Drop a PDF here or click to choose
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When compression helps most
This PDF compressor works best on scanned documents and PDFs with large embedded photos, where most of the file size comes from high-resolution images. A pdf compress pass at the Recommended level typically cuts a scanned document down significantly while keeping pages readable.
How compression works here
Each page is re-rendered at a reduced resolution and re-encoded as a compressed JPEG, then rebuilt into a new PDF — entirely in your browser using pdf.js and pdf-lib. Nothing is uploaded to compress compressed or already-optimized PDFs; the whole compress pdf to pdf process runs on your device.
Compress PDF FAQ
Which compression level should I pick? Low keeps the best image quality with a modest size reduction. Recommended balances quality and size for most documents. Extreme gives the smallest file for cases like email attachment limits, at the cost of visible image quality loss.
Will this pdf compressor reduce a scanned PDF? Yes — scanned pages are usually large, high-resolution images, so they compress the most. This is the main use case for a pdfcompress tool like this one.
Can I resize a PDF's page dimensions? This tool reduces the effective resolution of each page's content to shrink file size rather than changing the page's physical dimensions (e.g. Letter or A4 stays the same size on screen and when printed).
Why didn't my file get much smaller? Text-heavy PDFs are often already compact, since PDF text and fonts compress well on their own. Re-encoding pages as images mainly helps documents that are large because of embedded photos or scans — for a mostly-text document, size may barely change.
Is my file uploaded when I compress it? No. The entire compress pdf process — rendering, re-encoding, and rebuilding the PDF — happens locally in your browser.
Will text still be selectable after compressing? No. Compressing flattens each page into an image, so text is no longer selectable or searchable in the output file. If you need to keep selectable text, keep a copy of the original.