How to compress a PDF

Large PDFs are often caused by high-resolution images, scans, embedded fonts and duplicated resources.

Image-heavy PDFs

Scanned documents and photographs can contain much more image data than a screen needs. Reducing image resolution and JPEG quality can dramatically reduce size.

Text and vector PDFs

Text-based PDFs may already be efficient. Rebuilding them as images can sometimes make them larger or remove searchable text, so compression should preserve structure when possible.

Choose the right quality

For email, balanced compression is often a good starting point. For archival documents, keep higher quality and consider retaining the original.

Try the compressor

Use the PDF Compressor to test different quality levels and compare the resulting file size.