Compress PDF

About pdf compressor

Reduce a PDF locally with lossless cleanup and optional image optimization. Use this PDF compressor when a file must fit an email attachment limit, a portal upload cap, or a storage quota — and you need to choose the right balance between file size and page fidelity without sending the document to a third-party server.

The PDF compressor tries two strategies and keeps whichever produces the smaller file. It first rewrites the PDF losslessly using object streams, which preserves selectable text, links, and form fields exactly. It then, where the browser supports it, re-renders every page to a JPEG and rebuilds the document at one of three presets: Smaller renders at 0.85x with 56% quality, Balanced at 1x and 68%, Higher at 1.25x and 82%. That second path discards the text layer, so the result becomes a picture of the document. If neither route beats the original, you get the original back unchanged, which is common with PDFs that are already optimised.

How PDFolio helps you pdf compressor

PDFolio first tries a lossless rewrite that keeps the PDF structure intact. It then evaluates an adaptive image-based copy at the setting you choose and offers whichever result is smaller. If neither approach reduces the file, PDFolio retains the original bytes so the compressor never increases the download size.

The PDF compressor is worth trying before you reach for anything more drastic. If the rasterised route wins and you did not want to lose selectable text, run Extract Text on the source first and keep it alongside. If the document is large because it contains pages you do not need, Delete Pages or Extract Pages will usually save far more than re-encoding ever will.

Before you download

Scanned and image-heavy PDFs often benefit most from Smaller file. Highly optimized, vector, or text-only PDFs may already be close to their smallest practical size. Image-based compression can remove selectable text, active links, form fields, and other interactive PDF features, so choose Higher quality or retain the original when those features matter.

When the result is ready, download it immediately and open it in your usual PDF viewer to make a final check. You can then use Clear task data to release temporary file references from this browser tab. PDFolio does not create an account, cloud folder, or server-side document history.

A private way to pdf compressor

PDFolio handles the selected files in the active browser tab. A Web Worker on your device performs the PDF task so the interface can remain responsive; document bytes are not sent to a PDF processing server, upload queue, account database, or advertising platform.