PDF Compress

📖 Tool Introduction

A tool for making PDFs smaller, offering two routes, and which one you pick depends on what the result is for.

Lossless mode rearranges the internal object streams and discards metadata and redundant information. Text stays selectable and copyable, page sharpness does not change at all, and vector graphics remain vectors. The trade-off is that savings are modest, usually a few to a dozen percent, and a file that already carries little redundancy may barely shrink. It suits documents you still intend to edit, search or copy from.

Lossy mode renders every page into a JPEG and rebuilds the PDF from those images. This cuts size dramatically, especially for scans or image-heavy PDFs, often down to a fraction of the original. The cost is equally clear: text becomes part of the image and can no longer be selected, copied or searched, and it looks slightly softer when magnified. It fits archiving, uploads with a size cap, or anything you only need to read rather than edit.

Both modes run locally in your browser with no upload. The original size is shown before processing and afterwards you get the compressed size plus the saving percentage, and if the result happens to come out larger that is reported honestly rather than dressed up into a flattering number.

Here is why the result sometimes comes out larger. Lossless mode only rearranges and cleans, so if the original is already tight, the overhead of rearranging can exceed the redundancy removed and the file grows slightly. That is nothing to be alarmed by, and switching to lossy usually produces a genuine reduction. Lossy almost always shrinks the file because it replaces each page with a compressed image, at the cost already described above.

A simple rule for choosing: if you still need to edit it, need it searchable, or need to copy text out of it, always pick lossless; if you are only archiving, uploading somewhere with a size cap, or just sending it for someone to read, lossy is the better deal. When unsure, run lossless first and see what it saves, then try lossy if that was not enough, which costs only an extra half minute.

✨ Key Features

• Lossless mode rearranges object streams and clears metadata, keeping text and vectors intact
• Lossy mode rasterizes pages to JPEG, shrinking scans substantially
• Four image quality levels to balance size against appearance yourself
• Before and after sizes shown side by side with the saving percentage
• Honest reporting when the output ends up larger instead of hiding it
• Local browser processing with no server upload

🚀 How to Use

1. Click the upload area to pick a PDF, or drag one in
2. Choose a mode: lossless keeps text, lossy shrinks far more
3. In lossy mode pick an image quality level
4. Press start and wait for the progress bar
5. Compare the before and after sizes, then download

⚠️ Things to Note

• Lossy drops the text layer: Text becomes unselectable, uncopyable and unsearchable, so choose lossless if that matters
• Lossless savings are modest: Files with little redundancy may shrink only slightly, which is normal
• Very large files hit memory limits: Lossy renders page by page, so extremely long documents take a while and can fail
• Encrypted PDFs cannot be read: Password-protected files cannot be parsed and report a failure
• Nothing is kept on a server: Output stays on this device and a refresh means processing again