Compress a PDF until it is actually under the limit you were given
The visa portal wants under 500 KB. The job form wants 2 MB. Every other compressor offers you low, medium and high, then leaves you guessing. Type the number you were told and this hits it.
- Target
- Any size you type, in KB or MB
- Method
- Pages re-rendered, then re-encoded at a searched JPEG quality
- Search
- Up to 9 passes to land as close under your limit as it can
- Where it runs
- Your browser. The document is never sent anywhere
How to use it
- Drop the PDF in. Scanned documents shrink the most, often by 90 percent or more.
- Type the size the form asked for, and pick KB or MB.
- Press compress. The tool tries a quality, measures the result, and adjusts, up to nine times.
- You get the file plus the real before and after numbers, so you can check it yourself.
Questions
How is this different from a normal PDF compressor?
Normal compressors expose a quality setting and let you find out afterwards whether you cleared the limit. This one takes the limit as the input and searches for the setting, the way you actually think about the problem.
What happens to the text in my PDF?
Be aware of this trade: each page is rasterised, so selectable text becomes part of an image. The document looks the same and prints the same, but you can no longer search or copy from it. For a scan of a passport or a signed form, which is what most size limits apply to, that costs you nothing. For a text report you want searchable, use a lower compression elsewhere.
What if it cannot reach my target?
It tells you plainly and hands you the smallest version it managed, with the number. A 40 page colour brochure will not become 100 KB and no tool can make it, so you get the honest result rather than a silent failure.
Is there a file size cap?
No upload cap, because there is no upload. The practical ceiling is your device memory, and a 200 MB scan is fine on a normal laptop.
Next door
heic to jpg, remove background, passport photo, compress image to a size.