Compress PDF

There are three levels. Light makes a conservative reduction and is the right choice for anything that has to be printed or read closely, such as plans and detailed tables. Balanced is the everyday setting: clearly smaller, still comfortable to read on screen and good enough for most printing. Strong pushes hardest and suits scanned paperwork you simply need to send or archive, where fine detail matters less than getting under a size limit.

Our advice is to start one step lighter than you think you need, download the result and open it. Comparing before and after takes a few seconds and prevents the common mistake of over-compressing a document that only needed a modest trim.

Results vary enormously with the source. Scanned or photo-heavy documents routinely shrink by eighty to ninety per cent. A file that is mostly typed text is already efficient, so compression may save very little — occasionally almost nothing. That is normal, not a failure of the tool. Compression works by rebuilding page images, so text that was originally scanned stays a picture of text, and any text layer or selectable content on an image-based page may not survive the process. If keeping text selectable is essential, try splitting out the heavy pages instead and leave the rest untouched.

Everything happens inside your browser using your device's own processing power. The file is never uploaded, so nothing is stored, shared or retained anywhere, and no sign-up is required. Large documents take longer simply because every page has to be redrawn locally.