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Compress PDF

Make a PDF smaller, by rebuilding it or redrawing it. Free, and runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, stored or sent to a server.

About Compress PDF

Makes a PDF smaller, two ways, and is honest about the difference. Rebuilding rewrites the file's internal structure — objects packed into streams, anything unreferenced dropped — and changes nothing about how the document looks or behaves. Text stays text, images keep their resolution, and a file that was written carefully to begin with will barely shrink.

Redrawing turns every page into a JPEG at a resolution you choose. That is what makes a 40 MB scan fit in an email, and it is also what turns the words into pixels: after redrawing, nothing can be searched, selected, copied or read aloud by a screen reader. It is the right tool for a scan and the wrong one for a document somebody has to work with.

The result says how much came off, and tells you to keep the original when a rebuild came out larger — which happens, and means the file was already tight.

Where it helps

  • Rebuilding is completely safe: the document is identical to read, only smaller.
  • Redrawing gets dramatic reductions on scans, with the resolution and quality in your hands.
  • The result reports the saving in bytes and per cent, and says when the original was better.
  • Nothing is uploaded, so a confidential file is not handed to a compression service.

Limits

  • Redrawing destroys the text layer — no searching, selecting, copying or screen reading afterwards.
  • Rebuilding often saves very little, because most producers already write efficiently.
  • Neither method re-encodes the images inside a text document, so a report full of photographs will not shrink much on a rebuild.
  • Redrawing every page of a long document is slow and is capped at 300 pages a run.

Frequently asked questions

Which method should I use?

Rebuild first — it costs nothing. If the file is a scan and still too big, redraw the pages, and accept that the text becomes a picture.

Why did my file get bigger?

It was already efficiently written, and the rebuild's object streams and metadata cost more than the waste they removed. Keep the original; the result says so when it happens.

Will the text still be searchable?

After a rebuild, yes, exactly as before. After redrawing, no — run the result through the OCR tool if you need searchable text back.

Is this as good as a professional optimiser?

For rebuilding, close. For images, a dedicated tool can recompress each picture in place while keeping the text, which is beyond what a browser can do to an arbitrary PDF.

Related tools

  • PDF to Images — Turn every page into a PNG, JPG, WebP, GIF or JFIF
  • OCR PDF — Read the text off a scanned PDF
  • Split PDF — Cut a PDF into separate documents
  • PDF Viewer — Read, search and inspect a PDF without leaving the browser
  • Icon Font Generator — Build a web font from SVG icons or an SVG font
  • Image Converter — Convert between PNG, JPEG, JFIF, WebP, GIF, HEIC and SVG

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