Shrink a PDF for email or an upload form. Keep the text sharp and selectable, or turn scanned pages into lighter images, then download.
Free · No sign-up · No watermark · Your PDF stays in your browser
PDFdukan's Compress PDF tool reduces PDF file size free, right in your browser. The default Keep text mode shrinks the photos and scans inside the PDF while text, links, form fields and bookmarks stay as they are. For the smallest file, Pages as images turns each page into a lighter JPEG.
You see the old and new size before you download. If the new file is not smaller, you get your original back instead of a bigger copy.
Compressing a PDF takes four steps:
The two modes trade size against what stays editable:
| Keep text | Pages as images | |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Selectable and searchable | Part of the picture |
| Links, forms, bookmarks | Kept | Removed |
| Photos and scans | Re-saved at 110–220 DPI | Whole page at 108–180 DPI |
| Target size (KB/MB) | No | Yes |
Photos take far more space than text, so results vary. Our own tests on the Balanced level showed:
Text-only files shrink the least, since text and vector drawings are already compact.
Job portals, school forms and email often set a size limit. Choose Pages as images and tap a max size, from 100 KB to 5 MB. It tries sharper settings first. Gmail, for example, caps attachments on personal accounts at 25 MB.
If the limit is very small, the tool warns you when quality drops. Then remove pages you don't need with Extract PDF Pages, or send fewer pages at once.
No. Compress PDF reads and rebuilds your file with the open-source pdf-lib library running in your browser, so the PDF is not sent to a PDFdukan server. The page still loads site files, analytics and ads.
Yes, Compress PDF is free, needs no account and adds no watermark.
Not in Keep text mode, which leaves text untouched and only re-saves photos. Pages as images turns text into part of a picture, so check that small print is still readable.
Your PDF is probably mostly text or already compressed. Try Strong, or Pages as images if the text doesn't need to stay selectable.
Often, yes. Choose Pages as images and tap 200 KB. In our test, a 3.55 MB scan came out at 193 KB. Long or detailed files may not fit, and the tool tells you when that happens.
Yes. Compress PDF runs in your phone's browser, so there is no app to install. Very large PDFs may be slow.
No. Open the file with its password in a PDF reader, save an unlocked copy, then compress that copy.
Not yet; it handles one PDF at a time. To send several as one file, join them first with Merge PDF, then compress the result.
Connect Google Drive to save selected outputs to your own Drive storage. Review the destination before uploading sensitive documents.
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