Compress a PDF
Ethical Tube's free PDF compressor makes PDFs smaller in your browser. The recommended setting rewrites the PDF with compressed object streams while keeping text selectable, and the strong setting re-draws every page as an image, which can shrink scans and image-heavy PDFs but makes the text unselectable. You see the size before and after, and your PDF is never uploaded.
- Price
- Free
- Uploads
- None, it runs on your device
- Sign-up
- Not needed
- Levels
- Basic, Recommended, Strong
- Text
- Stays selectable, except Strong
- Batch
- Unlimited PDFs
How it works
How to compress a PDF
Add your PDF
Drop one or more PDFs onto the page, or click to choose them.
Pick a level
Recommended suits most files. Choose Strong for scans, or Basic to change as little as possible.
Compare and download
The new size is shown next to the original. If compressing doesn't help, you keep the original.
Good to know
What each level does
- Basic rewrites the PDF's internal structure. Nothing visible changes, and savings are usually small.
- Recommended also packs PDF objects into compressed streams. Text, links, images, and vector graphics keep their original quality.
- Strong re-draws every page as an image. It shrinks scanned PDFs the most, but text can no longer be selected or searched, and links stop working.
- PDFs that are mostly text are already small, so they shrink less than PDFs full of photos or scans.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Is the PDF compressor free?
Yes. It's completely free, with no sign-up, no watermark, and no limit on how many files you process. It costs Ethical Tube nothing to run, because the work happens on your own device rather than on a server.
Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. Everything happens inside your browser, so your files never leave your device. Once the page has loaded, the tool even works offline.
How do I make a PDF small enough to email?
Try Recommended first. If the PDF is a scan or full of photos and is still too big, use Strong, which usually brings scans under a few megabytes.
Will compressing make my PDF blurry?
Basic and Recommended preserve the original image quality. Strong rasterizes pages at 120 DPI, so text and graphics can look slightly soft when zoomed in.
Can it compress password-protected PDFs?
Not yet. Remove the password in your PDF reader first, then compress the PDF.
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