Compress PDF to a target size

Squeeze a PDF to fit a hard size limit — 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB or your own number.

🗜️

Drop a PDF here or click to select

Works best for scans, slides and image-heavy documents

✓ ·

Compress a PDF to an exact size limit

Upload forms and e-mail systems love hard limits: "PDF under 200 KB", "attachment max 5 MB", "resume ≤ 1 MB". Most compressors give you an abstract quality slider and hope the result fits. This tool works backwards: you state the size, and it searches for the highest image quality that still fits inside your budget.

  1. Drop the PDF above.
  2. Pick the target — the presets match the most common upload limits, or enter any custom KB value.
  3. Click Compress PDF; the tool renders each page and binary-searches the best quality that fits.
  4. Download the result and check it still reads well.
How it works, honestly: pages are rendered and re-encoded as images, so text becomes part of the picture — it is no longer selectable, and very small targets visibly reduce sharpness. This is the same trade-off every "compress to size" service makes; we just do it on your machine instead of theirs. For text-heavy documents where you must keep text, remove unwanted pages or split first instead.

Where a size target is required

Frequently asked questions

The result is bigger than my target — why?

If the document is mostly tiny vector text, even the lowest image quality can't get under the limit. Try a larger target, or split out the pages you actually need.

Does compression keep text selectable?

No — pages are rasterised. If that matters, use merge/split to reduce the document instead, or re-export from the source application with lower-quality images.

Is the original file modified?

Never. The original stays untouched on your disk; the compressed copy downloads as a separate file.

Only need some pages? Split first → All guides →