Compress PDF
Scanned contracts, photocopied certificates and camera-shot documents routinely weigh tens of megabytes and bounce off email attachment limits.
Designed for image-heavy and scanned PDFs: each page is re-rendered as a JPEG, so text-based PDFs will soften instead of shrinking.
How to use
- Add the scanned or image-heavy PDF you want to shrink.
- Set the JPEG quality and rendering DPI — lower values compress harder but soften fine print.
- Click "Compress PDF" and download the smaller file; the sizes before and after are shown.
Frequently asked questions
Which PDFs benefit most from this compressor?
Image-heavy and scanned documents: pages that are photos of paper, photocopied forms or camera shots. These files are mostly large images, and re-encoding them at a sensible DPI and quality cuts their size dramatically.
Will a text-based PDF get smaller too?
Probably not, and it may get larger. This tool re-renders pages as images, which is designed for image-heavy or scanned PDFs. A crisp digital text PDF becomes a photo of itself — usually bigger and slightly softer. Use it for scans.
Is my file uploaded during compression?
No. The pages are rendered and re-encoded entirely in your browser. Your document stays on your device from input to download — no server sees it.
How do I balance size against readability?
Start at 70% quality and 120 DPI. If small print matters, raise the DPI to 150; if you need the smallest possible file, drop quality toward 50% and DPI toward 90 and check the result.
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About this tool
Scanned contracts, photocopied certificates and camera-shot documents routinely weigh tens of megabytes and bounce off email attachment limits. This compressor shrinks them entirely inside your browser by re-rendering each page as a carefully tuned JPEG: you choose the rendering resolution (DPI) and the JPEG quality, and the tool rebuilds the PDF with those settings applied to every page. It is designed for image-heavy and scanned PDFs, where pages are photographs of paper — exactly the files that refuse to compress any other way. Be aware of the trade-off: the text in a scanned page becomes part of that image, so aggressive settings will soften small print, and a purely digital, text-based PDF is the wrong input here because it will turn into an image too. For its intended documents the savings are dramatic, often well over half the original size. Because everything is computed locally, bulky or confidential scans — tax papers, medical files, signed agreements — can be compressed without ever leaving your device, and the result reports its before and after sizes honestly.