Compress scanned documents entirely in your browser. No uploads.
⚠️ Important Limitations: This tool utilizes a "Flatten & Shrink" technique designed exclusively for image-heavy or scanned PDFs. It will flatten your document, meaning selectable text and hyperlinks will be removed.
A PDF Compressor reduces file size by optimizing internal content—primarily by re-compressing embedded images at lower quality settings and reducing image resolution. Scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs are the best candidates, as images typically account for the vast majority of file size. Text-based PDFs are already compact and may not benefit significantly. Our tool offers adjustable quality settings so you can balance file size reduction with visual quality.
Email attachment limits, cloud storage quotas, and upload restrictions frequently require smaller PDFs. Most online compression services require uploading documents to their servers—a serious concern for confidential content. Our compressor processes everything within your browser using JavaScript canvas rendering to re-encode images. The adjustable quality slider lets you preview the trade-off between compression ratio and quality before downloading.
Image-heavy PDFs (scanned documents, photo-rich reports) can often be reduced by 50-80%. Text-heavy PDFs with few images may see only 5-10% reduction, as text content is already very compact.
No. Text in PDFs is stored as vector data, not affected by our compression. Only embedded raster images are re-encoded at lower quality. Text remains crisp and searchable.
For general sharing: medium quality (50-60%). For archival: higher quality (75-85%). For maximum compression: lower settings (30-40%).