How to use it
- Choose a PDF.
- Pick a level: Tidy (lossless) or Light, Medium, Strong.
- Press Compress, check the new size, then download.
Where PDF size comes from
In most big PDFs, nearly all the bytes are images: scans and phone photos stored at far more resolution than a screen or printer needs. A 12-megapixel photo on an A4 page is about 380 DPI; 110 DPI looks identical on screen and is roughly a tenth of the data.
Light, Medium and Strong redraw each page at a lower resolution and store it as a JPEG. That is very effective on scans, but the page becomes a picture: text is no longer selectable, and links and form fields are gone. Tidy keeps everything and only rewrites the file’s internal structure more compactly, which helps with bloated exports.
Try it before you choose
The compression explainer on How conversion works lets you drag DPI and JPEG quality and watch the byte count change on a real rendered sample.
Questions
Why did my PDF get bigger?
A PDF that is mostly text is already small; redrawing text as images makes it larger. Docrift warns you and lets you keep the original. Try Tidy for such files.
Which level for email?
Medium. Scans end up around 100–250 KB per page and remain easy to read.
Is my PDF uploaded?
No. It is rendered with pdf.js and rebuilt with pdf-lib in your tab.
Related tools
- Merge PDFPut a contract, its annexes and the signed page into one file, in the right order.
- PDF to JPGTurn PDF pages into JPG images for slides, social posts or forms that only accept pictures.
- JPG to PDFCombine photos, scans and screenshots into one tidy PDF.
- Split PDFPull out the pages you need, or cut a long PDF into several smaller ones.