Compress PDF

Oversized PDFs almost always come from one of four sources. Scanned documents are the worst. A phone or flatbed scan is really a stack of full-resolution photos in a PDF wrapper, so a seven-page scan can hit 10MB without trying. Word and Google Docs exports bloat for a different reason: they embed whole font files and hidden metadata. Accounting and invoicing software adds proprietary fonts. And brochures or annual reports full of high-res photos are the heaviest of the lot.

Compression re-encodes those embedded images at a sensible screen resolution and drops the fonts and metadata you never needed. On a screen you will not see the difference. Scans and photo-heavy reports shrink the most; a plain-text document barely moves, because text is already tiny. So if a text-only PDF is still too big, the fix lives at the source, not in a compressor.

The usual reason people land here is a portal size cap. Government, exam, visa, and job-application forms routinely allow only a few hundred kilobytes per document — a scholarship form might demand 200KB, a property or tax portal 1MB, a benefits or admissions form somewhere in between. Scanned certificates sail past these limits constantly.

What survives the squeeze: real text stays selectable and searchable, links and bookmarks stay put, and the page layout does not move. Only the image resolution comes down. That is exactly the right trade for a portal upload, an email, or a WhatsApp share. It is the wrong trade for print-ready artwork going to a commercial press, so use a local tool with proper quality control there. One catch people forget: compression invalidates an existing digital signature, so only compress unsigned originals.

On privacy, the file is virus-scanned with ClamAV, nothing asks you to sign up, and both files are wiped after two hours (longer for results over 2 GB or with a Pro pass). If a document carries a full PAN or bank account number, an offline tool that never uploads is the more cautious route. For everyday submissions, the two-hour window is a fair deal. Files up to 100MB go through, and most real PDFs finish in well under a minute.