What Is This Tool?
The PDF Compressor makes a smaller PDF by turning each page into a compressed image. It is useful for scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs that are too large to email or upload.
What Can You Do With It?
Reduce scanned PDFs for email attachments. Meet upload size limits on job or government portals. Shrink image-heavy brochures.
How Does It Work?
Each page is rendered in your browser with PDF.js, saved as a JPEG at the chosen quality, and placed into a new PDF of the same page size with pdf-lib. If the new file is not smaller, the original is kept.
Key Benefits
Works offline after the page loads. Keeps original page sizes.
Limitations and Important Notes
Output is image-based: text cannot be selected or searched, and links and form fields are lost. Text-only PDFs may not get smaller. Large PDFs can take time on slower devices.
Privacy and Security
Files are processed inside your browser on your own device. They are not uploaded to Usekit servers, and the result is created locally for you to download.
Real-World Example
A 12 MB, 10-page scanned PDF processed at 60% quality can drop to a few MB, depending on the scan. A short text-only PDF may stay the same, and the tool keeps the original.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can I not select text after compressing?
Pages are converted to images to reduce size, so the text layer is not kept.
Is there a file size limit?
There is no fixed limit, but very large files depend on your device memory.
Will it reduce quality?
Yes, some image quality is lost. Use a higher quality setting if text looks blurry.
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How to use this tool
- Upload a PDF and choose the quality.
- Click Process file and wait for it to finish.
- Download the compressed PDF.