PDF Tools
PDF Compressor
PDF Compressor reduces a PDF's file size by re-rendering each page and re-encoding it as a compressed JPEG image, then rebuilding the PDF from those images.
This approach works especially well on scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs. Because it rasterizes each page, any selectable text in the original will become part of the image and won't be selectable or searchable in the compressed output -- a trade-off worth knowing about before you compress a text-heavy document.
How to Use the PDF Compressor
- Open the PDF Compressor tool.
- Choose your PDF file.
- Pick an image quality level -- lower quality means a smaller file.
- Click Compress PDF.
- Compare the before/after file size shown, and download the result.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did my compressed file get bigger instead of smaller?
This can happen with PDFs that are already small or purely text-based with no images -- rasterizing plain text into an image is sometimes less efficient than the original vector text. Try a lower quality setting, or skip compression for already-small text PDFs.
Will the text still be selectable after compressing?
No -- each page becomes a single image, so text will no longer be selectable or searchable. Use this tool when file size matters more than searchable text, such as for scanned documents.
Is this suitable for scanned documents?
Yes, this is exactly the use case it's optimized for -- scanned pages are already images, so re-encoding them at a lower quality typically shrinks the file significantly with minimal visible quality loss.