Compress a PDF
Most “compress PDF” sites do one thing and do not tell you what it costs. Here you pick: keep the text layer and take a modest saving, or rasterise the pages and take a big one.
- Runs entirely in your browser
- Works offline
- No upload
- No sign-up
- No watermark
Loading the tool…
How it works
- Drop your PDF.
- Choose the lossless tidy-up, or rasterising with a resolution and JPEG quality.
- Compress and download. The tool reports the real before/after size, including when there is no saving at all.
Why nothing is uploaded
Every operation on this page is done by code running inside your browser tab, using the same engine that renders web pages. The file is read from disk into your tab’s memory, transformed there, and written back out as a download. It is never sent anywhere — not to us, not to a third party.
Verify it yourself
- Open your browser’s developer tools (F12) and select the Network tab.
- Load your file and run the tool.
- The only requests you will see are the tool’s own code and, once cached, none at all.
Frequently asked questions
Why is the lossless mode only saving a few per cent?
Because it only re-packs the file structure: object streams, dropped metadata, no duplicate resources. If your PDF is large because it contains photographs or a scan, the bytes are in the images, and no lossless pass can touch them without re-encoding.
What exactly do I lose by rasterising?
The text layer. After rasterising, each page is a picture: you cannot select, copy or search the text, and screen readers cannot read it. Vector drawings become pixels too. In exchange, a 40 MB scan often ends up under 4 MB. Keep the original.
Which resolution should I choose?
150 DPI is the sensible default: crisp on screen and fine for ordinary printing. 100 DPI is for reading on a phone. 300 DPI is for something that will be printed at full size, and will not save much.
A 200-page file — will my browser cope?
Pages are rendered one at a time and the canvas is released after each, so memory stays flat. It is slower than a server would be, because it is your laptop doing it — but nothing is uploaded.