About Compress PDF
This tool reduces a PDF's file size by re-rendering each page as a compressed image — the same underlying idea as compressing a photo, applied to every page of your document. Choose a compression level and the result updates automatically, with a live preview and a before/after size comparison. All processing happens locally in your browser, using Mozilla's PDF.js engine for rendering; your file is never uploaded to a server.
Why This Approach, and What It Means for Your File
Reliably finding and recompressing only the embedded images inside a PDF's internal structure — without touching anything else — is genuinely difficult to do safely across the huge variety of ways different software (scanners, phone apps, Word, Adobe Acrobat, print drivers) encode images inside a PDF file. Getting it wrong risks producing a corrupted file, which is worse than not compressing at all. Instead, this tool takes a more reliable path: it renders each full page as a single image and rebuilds the PDF from those images, which works consistently regardless of how the original file was created.
The practical effect: every page becomes an image, so any selectable or searchable text in your original PDF will no longer be selectable or searchable in the result — screen readers and copy-paste won't work on it either. For pages that are scanned documents or contain photos, this usually compresses very well, often dramatically. For pages that are mostly clean, plain text, don't expect much size reduction — vector text is already extremely compact, and rendering it as a compressed image is rarely more efficient; in some cases the result can even come out slightly larger than the original page. If your PDF is entirely text-based and already reasonably small, this tool may not help much, and preserving the original might be the better choice.
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