Compress PDF

Three compression levels with adjustable quality

No database: AIMRAN doesn't store your files, text or results

What is Compress PDF?

Scanned PDFs or ones full of photos can weigh tens of megabytes and won't fit in an email or in government upload forms. This tool shrinks them so you can send them without trouble.

You choose a compression level, low, medium or high, or set the quality and resolution yourself. When it finishes you see how much you saved and, if for some reason the result is larger, it offers to keep the original.

How to use it

  1. Drag in the PDF you want to shrink.
  2. Choose the level: “Low”, “Medium” or “High”.
  3. If you prefer, turn on “Advanced settings” to set the JPG quality and resolution.
  4. Click “Compress PDF”.
  5. Check the savings and download the compressed PDF.

Advantages

Technical details

Compression rebuilds the document with each page rendered with pdf.js and encoded as JPEG, keeping the physical page size. Levels: low (150 DPI, 80% quality), medium (110 DPI, 65%) and high (72 DPI, 45%); advanced settings allow 50 to 300 DPI and JPEG quality from 10% to 95%. Because pages are turned into images, the text is no longer selectable and links and forms are lost, so the method is intended for scanned or photo-heavy PDFs. Accepts PDFs up to 200 MB; each rendered page is limited to 16,384 px per side.

Frequently asked questions

How do I reduce a PDF's size to send it by email?

Drag in the PDF, choose the “Medium” level and click “Compress PDF”. If it is still too large, try “High”.

Which compression level should I choose?

“Low” keeps more sharpness, “Medium” balances quality and size, and “High” shrinks as much as possible at the expense of sharpness. For scanned text documents, “Medium” is usually enough.

Can I still copy the text after compressing?

No. Each page becomes a compressed image, so the text is no longer selectable. If you need it, run the PDF through OCR afterwards.

Why doesn't my PDF get smaller?

PDFs created from Word or similar, with little graphic content, are already light and may grow when turned into images. In that case the tool warns you and you can keep the original.

More PDF tools