Guide
How to compress a PDF without losing quality
5 min read
Large PDFs are a hassle — they bounce off email limits and upload forms, and they are slow to share. The good news: most PDFs can be made dramatically smaller with almost no visible change in quality.
Why PDFs get large
Two things usually dominate a PDF's size: high-resolution images and embedded fonts. A single phone photo can add several megabytes. Compression works by re-encoding images to a sensible resolution and quality for on-screen and print use.
Compress in three steps
- Open the Compress PDF tool and drop in your file.
- Pick a compression level — Balanced keeps quality high while cutting size; Strong squeezes hardest for the smallest file.
- Download the result. Text stays selectable and sharp because it is never rasterised.
Tips for the best results
- Start with Balanced; only go Strong if you still need it smaller.
- If a scan is huge, run OCR first — it can also tidy up the pages.
- For a set of files, compress each and merge afterwards.
That is it. A 20 MB deck often drops to 2–3 MB with no visible difference on screen.