How to reduce the size of a PDF without ruining it
A PDF that is too big to email or upload is one of the most common small annoyances of office life. The good news is that most oversized PDFs can be shrunk a lot with no visible loss, once you understand where the weight comes from.
Why PDFs get so large
Text takes almost no space. The size comes from pictures: photos pasted into a document, pages scanned at a very high resolution, or slides exported with full-size images. A twenty-page scan can easily be bigger than a two-hundred-page text report. Embedded fonts and leftover data from editing add a little more.
Decide on a target first
Before compressing, find out the limit you have to meet. Email services often accept attachments of only a few megabytes, and many online forms and government portals accept files of 1 MB or even 200 KB. With Compress PDF you can choose a ready target such as 200 KB or 1 MB, or enter your own size.
Step by step
- Open the Compress PDF tool and choose your file.
- Pick the target size that matches the limit you need.
- Start the compression and wait for the result.
- Download the new file and keep the original untouched.
Always check the result
Open the compressed file and zoom in. Look at small print, tables, stamps and signatures, because these are the first things to suffer when a file is squeezed hard. If something is hard to read, run the tool again with a larger target instead of accepting a blurry document.
Keep new files small from the start
- Scan ordinary text pages at a moderate resolution, around 150 to 200 dpi, and use black and white when colour is not needed.
- When exporting from a word processor or a presentation program, choose the standard or minimum size option rather than print quality.
- Shrink large photos before inserting them, for example with Compress image.
- Delete pages you do not need with Delete pages before sending.
Your file stays with you
Listok works inside your browser, so the document is processed on your device and is not uploaded to a server. That matters when the PDF contains contracts, IDs or bank details.