Compress PDF
Shrink PDFs to fit email or government upload limits. Best for scanned documents, photo-heavy PDFs, and contracts you need to send by email.
Keep-text mode: your text stays selectable and searchable — only embedded images are shrunk. Big savings on photo-heavy PDFs; text-only PDFs are already small so they change little.
Drop PDFs anywhere on the page
Any number, any size your device can hold.
We try progressively heavier compression until each PDF fits under your target. May take 2–4× longer than preset mode.
Advanced settings
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PDFs appear here after you drop them.
How does PDF compression work?
Most "huge" PDFs are huge because of embedded images at print resolution (300 DPI scans, photos from a phone, screenshots of dense documents). Reducing those images is where almost all the savings come from.
This tool re-renders every page of your PDF at a lower DPI you choose, then re-encodes each page as a JPEG inside a new PDF. The result is a file that looks the same on screen but is often 5–20× smaller — perfect for the common goal of "fit this contract under the 10 MB email cap."
The trade-off: text becomes an image, so you can no longer copy-paste from the PDF or search inside it. For scanned documents that were never searchable to begin with, this is a non-issue. For a born-digital PDF with selectable text, weigh whether you care more about size or searchability.
Which preset for which job?
Email attachment — 150 DPI, 72% JPEG. Targets under 10 MB so Gmail accepts it without splitting. Best general-purpose preset.
Government upload — 120 DPI, 65% JPEG. Targets under 5 MB, the common cap for tax / immigration / school forms.
Web embed — 110 DPI, 78% JPEG. Optimized for fast in-browser viewing.
Print quality — 200 DPI, 88% JPEG. Preserves enough detail for office printers. Larger output but still much smaller than the original print-resolution scan.
Maximum compression — 96 DPI, 55% JPEG. Smallest possible file. Small text gets less legible.
Why Compress Your PDF?
PDF files grow large fast — and large PDFs bounce off email servers, get rejected by upload portals, and take forever to share. Here's what causes the bloat and how to fix it.
PDFs balloon when they contain photos
A scanned document embeds a full-resolution photo of every page. A 10-page scanned contract can easily reach 50–100 MB. A product catalogue with dozens of embedded images is even larger. The text and vector graphics take almost no space — the culprit is almost always the embedded JPEG images.
Email and portal limits cut off large PDFs
Gmail caps attachments at 25 MB, Outlook at 20 MB, many government portals at 10 MB, and some court filing systems at 5 MB. Compressing to a specific target size before you send avoids bounce-backs, rejected submissions, and the need to switch to a file-sharing link.
Compression mode matters — keep your text
Two approaches exist. Structural compression downsamples only the embedded images, leaving fonts, text layers, hyperlinks, and form fields completely intact — text stays selectable and screen-readable. Flatten-to-image converts every page to a raster picture — it compresses more but text becomes a blurry photo. HandyCompress defaults to structural and lets you choose.
Don't upload sensitive PDFs to unknown servers
Contracts, tax returns, medical records, and legal documents are exactly the files people compress most — and exactly what you'd least want uploaded to a third-party server. HandyCompress runs entirely in your browser using WebAssembly: the file is processed by your own CPU and downloaded directly. It never reaches a server.
Frequently asked questions
Are my PDFs uploaded to your server?
No. Compression runs entirely in your browser using Mozilla's PDF.js renderer and the pdf-lib library, both compiled to JavaScript that runs locally. Your PDF — even a sensitive contract or tax return — never leaves your device. Disconnect WiFi after the page loads to prove it.
Will I still be able to search inside the compressed PDF?
Yes, in the default "Keep text selectable" mode — we shrink only the embedded images and leave the text layer, fonts, and links untouched, so the output stays fully searchable and copy-pasteable. If you switch to "Smallest size" mode (or use Target file size), pages are flattened to images and text is no longer selectable — that mode is for scanned documents or squeezing under a hard size limit.
Does it work on password-protected PDFs?
No. Unlock the PDF first using whatever software it was protected with (e.g. Acrobat, Preview on macOS, or a desktop tool). We don't accept the password to avoid creating any reason for the data to leave your device.
Are PDF form fields and signatures preserved?
In this rasterize mode: no. The output is a flat picture of each page. Form fields become un-fillable images and digital signatures are stripped (the visible signature stays as a picture, but the cryptographic part is gone). Don't compress a digitally-signed contract this way — the signature will be invalidated.
Why are my "compressed" PDFs sometimes bigger than the original?
If the original PDF was mostly text (small filesize already), re-rendering each page as a high-DPI JPEG produces a larger output. For text-only PDFs, this tool is the wrong choice — use it for scans, photo-heavy reports, and forms where images dominate the file size.
What's the maximum PDF size?
No hard cap. The real limit is your device's RAM — large PDFs need lots of memory because every page is decoded into a pixel buffer. A modern laptop can typically handle PDFs of several hundred MB and hundreds of pages.