Lossless: pages are never re-encoded

Compress a PDF

Rewrite the file so it takes less space without changing a pixel. The tool reports exactly how much it saved — including when the answer is almost nothing.

The PDF is rewritten in this tab with pdf-lib. Nothing is uploaded.

Short answer: drop the PDF and press “Compress and download”. Pages, text and images are left exactly as they are; the saving comes from the file's structure. The result line shows the real before/after size, so a file that cannot shrink is reported instead of being padded with a fake percentage.

What “lossless” actually means here

Most “compress PDF” pages re-render every page as an image. That always shrinks a file and always damages it: text stops being selectable, thin lines go grey and a printed copy looks soft. This tool takes the other route — it loads the document with a real parser, writes it back with compressed object streams, and removes data that only a viewer uses, such as page thumbnails and XMP metadata. If the result is not smaller, you get the smaller of the two.

When the file will not shrink

A PDF that is already optimised, or one that is a single large scan, has almost nothing to strip. In that case the honest answer is the one shown: a few kilobytes, or none. For scans, the useful lever is resolution and colour depth — that is a different tool with a different trade-off, and it is linked below rather than hidden inside this one.

Compression questions

How much smaller will my PDF get?

It depends on the file. This tool removes duplicate objects, rewrites the file with compressed object streams and drops thumbnails and XMP metadata. A file exported by a careless generator can lose a third of its size; a file that is already clean often loses less than 2%. The result line reports the real number, and if the rewrite made the file bigger the original is kept instead.

Does compressing change the pages?

No. Text stays text, images are not re-encoded, and nothing is re-rendered. That is deliberate: re-encoding is what makes a document look blurry, and this tool will not do that behind your back. If you want scanned pages re-encoded as smaller images, the grayscale and re-encode tool does exactly that and says so first.

What about a scan that will not shrink?

A scanned PDF is mostly one big image per page, and this optimiser never touches images, so expect little change. Use the grayscale tool with a lower DPI to re-encode those pages — the trade-off is that the page becomes a picture and its text is no longer selectable.

Is my file uploaded?

No. The PDF is read with the File API and rewritten with pdf-lib in this tab. There is no server call, and the downloaded file is built from memory.

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