Compress PDF
Drag and drop, or click to upload a PDF
Compress PDF re-renders every page to an image at a quality you choose, then rebuilds a new PDF from those images - the standard approach for shrinking scanned or photo-heavy documents. It runs on mupdf and pdf-lib entirely in your browser tab; your file is never uploaded anywhere. Because it works by rasterizing, the output's text is no longer selectable or searchable - it's a real tradeoff, not a bug, and it's the right tool specifically for image-heavy PDFs, not text-heavy ones.
How to use it
- Drag and drop, or click to upload a PDF.
- Adjust the JPEG quality slider - lower means a smaller file, at the cost of visual quality.
- Click "Compress PDF" and wait for it to process each page.
- Check the before/after size comparison, then download the result.
Frequently asked questions
Is my PDF uploaded to a server to compress it?
No - every page is re-rendered and recompressed entirely in your browser using mupdf and pdf-lib. The file never leaves your device.
Why is the text in my compressed PDF no longer selectable?
This tool compresses by rendering each page to an image at a lower quality, then rebuilding a new PDF from those images - the same technique most "compress PDF" tools use for scanned or photo-heavy documents. That trades selectable/searchable text for a much smaller file. If you need the text layer kept intact, this isn't the right tool for that PDF.
What kind of PDF does this work best on?
Scanned documents and PDFs full of large photos - exactly the files that get huge because of embedded images. A PDF that's mostly plain text is already small and won't shrink much (and will lose its selectable text for little benefit).
How much smaller will my file get?
It depends entirely on the source - a heavily-scanned PDF can shrink by 70-90%, while an already-small text PDF might not shrink at all. Try a couple of quality settings and compare.
Does compressing reduce the page count or content?
No - every page stays, in the same order, at the same visual size. Only the image quality each page is rendered at changes.