🗜️ PDF300
Compress a PDF and keep the text sharp
The browser compressor re-encodes pages as pictures, which is fine for scans but softens small type. This one works on the PDF itself, so lines and letters stay clean.
Open the toolRuns on our server — the file is uploaded, processed and sent back.
How it works
- Add the PDFThe file is sent to the server for this one.
- Pick how hard to squeezeLighter keeps more detail; harder makes a smaller file.
- DownloadSave the smaller file.
Questions
Yes — this one runs on a server, so the file is sent over the network and processed there. If you would rather nothing left your device, use the browser tools on the main page instead.
Neither. No account, no watermark on the output. The practical limit is your device memory — large scanned files use more of it.
Guide: high-quality compression
When you'd use this over the browser tool
The browser compressor on the main tools page re-draws every page as a JPEG image, which shrinks a file reliably but turns selectable, searchable text into a picture of text. For a scan, that costs nothing, since a scan was already an image. For a document exported from Word or a text editor, it means losing the ability to search, select, or have a screen reader read the file afterward. This server tool compresses the PDF itself — on our server, using Ghostscript's image-resampling, roughly comparable to its "ebook" preset — rather than converting pages to pictures, so body text and vector line work stay exactly as sharp and exactly as selectable as they were.
What it actually shrinks
Almost all of the size reduction comes from downsampling embedded images — photos, scanned figures, logos placed at a higher resolution than the page needs. A PDF built almost entirely from live text (a typed report with no pictures) will shrink only a little, because there is little image data to resample; a PDF full of high-resolution photographs will shrink substantially. If a file does not get noticeably smaller here, that is itself useful information: it means the file's size is mostly text and structure, not oversized images, and a different approach (checking for embedded fonts, or simply accepting the size) may be more appropriate than further compression.
Choosing a squeeze level
Lighter settings keep more image detail and produce a larger file; harder settings shrink further at the cost of image sharpness — text and line art are unaffected either way, since only the embedded images are resampled. Start with the gentlest setting and only increase it if the result is still too large for where it needs to go.
More questions
That one works entirely in your browser by re-drawing pages as JPEGs — fast and private, but the result is image-only. This one uploads the file and compresses it as a true PDF, keeping text sharp and selectable.
Not directly — it compresses by quality level, not by target size. For an exact number, use Compress to target size, which is built specifically to search for a result under a size you name.
No — an encrypted file should be unlocked with Remove PDF password first if you need to compress it.
The server accepts files up to 100 MB; very large files simply take longer to process and return.