Compress a PDF

Compressing a PDF is almost always about a limit somewhere else: an email attachment cap, a portal that rejects files over 10 MB, a form that wants "under 2 MB," a folder of scans eating your storage. This tool shrinks PDFs in your browser with three presets — High quality for documents that still need to look crisp in print, Balanced for everyday sharing, and Smallest for getting under a hard cap. You see the before and after sizes immediately, with a preview, so you can judge the tradeoff before downloading.

How it works: each page is re-rendered by PDFium — the same engine that powers this site's PDF editor — at the preset's resolution, and the document is rebuilt around efficiently compressed images. This approach shines on exactly the files that are usually bloated: scans, photographed documents, and image-heavy decks, where 60–90% reductions are common. The honest tradeoff is that rebuilt pages are images, so selectable text in the original becomes non-selectable in the compressed copy — the tool detects this and warns you before you download, rather than letting you find out later.

Because compression happens on your machine, there is no upload queue, no per-file daily limit, and no server holding a copy of your contract while it shrinks it. If the result ever comes out larger than the original — which can happen with already-optimized digital PDFs — the tool says so plainly instead of serving you a worse file behind a green checkmark. Your original is untouched either way; the compressed version downloads under a separate name.