Compress PDF

It depends on what’s inside. Scans and photo-heavy PDFs often shrink by 50–90%, because their images are far larger than a screen or printer needs. A PDF that’s mostly text is already compact and may barely change.

Text, lines and vector drawings aren’t touched, so they stay sharp and searchable. Only the images inside are reduced: Recommended keeps them at 150 DPI, which looks sharp on screen and prints well, and Strong goes down to 100 DPI for the smallest file.

Choose “Target size” and enter the limit. The tool finds the highest image quality that fits, and only saves pages as images if shrinking the images isn’t enough. It aims under 100,000 bytes for 100 KB and 1,000,000 for 1 MB, so the file passes however the form counts a kilobyte.

A scan of one or two pages usually can. Every page needs a few kilobytes even at low resolution, so a long document may not fit: split it or delete the pages the form doesn’t need first. If the target can’t be reached, the tool tells you how small it could get.

A scan is already a picture, so nothing is lost. In a PDF with real text, the fonts alone can take more than 100 KB, and saving each page as a compact image is then the only way under the limit, at the cost of selectable text. At 500 KB or more, shrinking the photos is usually enough, and the result tells you if pages had to become images.

It has no large images to shrink, or it was compressed already. Most of a text PDF’s size is its fonts, which can’t be reduced without changing how the text looks. Target size can go further by saving pages as images, as a last resort.

Scan in grayscale at 150–200 DPI rather than colour at 600 DPI, and crop away the scanner bed around the page. A clean, flat scan compresses far smaller than a phone photo with shadows.

Upload only the pages the form asks for, using Extract PDF Pages. Fewer pages leave more of the limit for each one, so they come out sharper.

No. Every tool runs in your web browser, so your files are read, changed and saved on your own device and never sent to LabAnvil or anyone else. Once the page has loaded, the tools even work offline.

Free, with no watermark, no daily limit and no account.