How to make a PDF smaller without losing the text
The best compression method depends on what is inside your PDF. A document made mostly of selectable text behaves differently from a scanned document containing large photographs of each page.
Open Compress PDF ↗Start with lossless compression
- Open Compress PDF and choose your document.
- Choose lossless compression when you want to keep text selectable. It optimizes PDF structure without turning each page into a picture.
- Run the tool and download the output. Compare its size with the original and review a few representative pages.
For scans, image compression can make a bigger difference
Scanned pages are often large images. Reducing their resolution and image quality can save more space than optimizing PDF structure. Image-based compression renders the pages and creates a new PDF from those images.
That tradeoff matters: rasterized output no longer keeps the original selectable text, vectors or interactive form fields. Keep a lossless copy when you need those features. You can use OCR on a scan to add searchable text, but recognition can introduce mistakes.
Why a PDF might not become smaller
A small, optimized document may have very little redundant data left. Rebuilding it can add overhead, so a compression pass may produce a larger file. OhhPDF keeps an already compact original when the attempted compression would increase its size.
Repeated compression does not guarantee further savings. An image can become visibly softer without getting small enough for a strict upload limit. Review small text, diagrams and shaded backgrounds before deciding whether the quality is acceptable.
A target such as 100 KB is not always achievable
A fixed size limit depends on the page count, images and readability you need. There is no setting that can preserve any document perfectly and always make it 100 KB. A twenty-page scan and a one-page text document have very different requirements.
If the receiving service allows multiple files, split the PDF into smaller parts. If only a few pages are needed, extract them or remove unnecessary pages. Those changes reduce the content being sent rather than repeatedly sacrificing image quality.
Keep a useful original
Download compressed results under a separate name. Check page count, orientation and whether text selection still works if you chose lossless mode. For forms or certificate-signed documents, keep the original and check how the receiving workflow handles a rebuilt copy.
Compression happens in your browser with no document upload endpoint. Processing workspaces do not load the analytics SDK. File size and processing speed still depend on your device, and the relevant tool explains its limits.
Tools used in this guide
Read how local processing and optional browsing analytics work.