Compress PDF

This tool reduces the size of a PDF by re-encoding the images inside it, which is where almost all the weight in a large PDF actually sits. A scanned contract is a stack of photographs and will often drop by 80 per cent or more; a twenty-page text report is already compressed and will barely move, and the tool says so rather than handing back an identical file with no explanation. Text, fonts and layout are never touched, so nothing in the document changes except how heavy the pictures are. It runs entirely in your browser — the file is opened on your own device and never uploaded, which matters because the PDFs people compress are usually the ones they are about to email to someone.

How to use it

1. Add a PDF. It is opened on your device; nothing is sent anywhere.
2. Choose how hard to squeeze — light keeps it sharp enough to print, balanced suits email, strong is for reading on a screen — or set a size limit and let it find the best quality that fits.
3. Aiming at a size works down through stronger settings and stops at the first that meets your number, so you never lose more quality than the limit actually requires.
4. Every embedded JPEG is re-encoded at the chosen quality and scaled down if it is larger than it needs to be.
5. An image is only replaced if the new version is actually smaller — re-encoding an already-optimised picture usually makes it bigger.
6. Download. The result tells you the old size, the new size, and how many images it could work on.

Examples

• A scanned contract taken from 12 MB to under 2 MB for email.
• A photo-heavy report shrunk to fit an upload form with a 5 MB cap.
• A text-only report that barely changes — and is told so, rather than silently returned.

What this tool cannot do

• Most of what can be compressed is the images inside the document. A PDF that is mostly text is already close to as small as it gets, and asking for a large reduction will not produce one.
• Compression below a certain point becomes visible. When a target needs it, the tool says so before you commit rather than after.
• An already-optimised PDF may barely shrink. That is the file being efficient, not the tool failing.

Frequently asked questions

How do I reduce the size of a PDF?

Add the file, pick a strength and download the result. What actually happens is that the images inside are re-encoded at a lower quality and scaled down if they are larger than they need to be. That is where the size is: a page of text is a few kilobytes, while a single scanned page can be several megabytes. Nothing else in the document is altered — the text, the fonts and the layout come through untouched, because the ways of shrinking those risk changing what the document says for a saving of a few per cent.

Why did my PDF barely get smaller?

Almost certainly because it is mostly text, and text in a PDF is already compressed. There is very little left to take out, and any tool promising a dramatic reduction on a text document is either rebuilding it — which can change how it looks — or not telling you the truth. The other common case is a PDF whose images were already optimised before they were placed; re-encoding those makes them bigger, not smaller, so the originals are kept. In both situations this tool tells you what it found instead of returning the same file and letting you assume it worked.

Does compressing a PDF reduce its quality?

The images lose some quality; nothing else does. JPEG compression is lossy, so re-encoding at a lower setting discards detail that cannot be recovered — that is exactly the trade being made for the smaller file. Text stays perfectly sharp at any strength, because text is not an image and is never re-encoded. Choose light if the document will be printed, where the loss would show; balanced is fine for anything read on a screen; strong is for when the size limit matters more than the picture. Keep the original if you may need the detail later.

How do I get a PDF under a size limit for an upload?

Choose 'A size limit' and type the number the form demands, between 1 and 50 MB. The tool then works down through progressively stronger settings and stops at the first one that fits, so you get the best quality that meets the limit rather than the smallest possible file. If it has to go far enough that the pictures visibly soften, it says so. And if the target is genuinely unreachable it tells you why instead of grinding the images to mush: a 6 MB PDF that is 4 MB of text cannot reach 1 MB however hard the pictures are squeezed, because compression never touches text. In that case it reports the floor — the size below which this document cannot go — and splitting it into fewer pages is the answer, not a stronger setting.

Is my file uploaded to a server?

No. The PDF is opened, re-encoded and saved entirely inside your browser on your own device, and nothing is transmitted or stored. You can load the page, disconnect from the internet, and it still works. You can also check it without taking our word for it: run curl -I https://ekaanhub.com/compress-pdf and look for connect-src 'none' in the content-security-policy line, which instructs the browser to refuse every request this page could make, including to us. This is worth caring about for this particular tool: the documents people compress are the ones they are about to send to someone — contracts, scans of identity documents, medical letters — and free compressors that require an upload are asking for a copy of exactly those.