Compress PDF to an exact size

1. Drop your PDF. Drag it onto the box above or click to browse. The file is read locally — it never leaves your device.
2. Pick a target size. Choose one of the presets — 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB, 1 MB, 2 MB — or type a custom KB/MB value. Prefer hands-on control? Switch to Manual quality and set the JPEG quality and page resolution yourself.
3. Watch it work. A per-page progress bar shows each compression pass. In exact-size mode the tool tries up to seven quality/resolution combinations, from sharpest to smallest, and stops at the first one that fits under your target.
4. Download. You'll see a before/after size summary and a badge that says either "Target met" or "Closest possible", so you always know exactly what you got. Click download and you're done.

Because the source PDF stays in memory, you can keep changing the target after uploading — click 100 KB, then 500 KB, then a custom 300 KB — and the tool recompresses automatically each time. No re-uploading, no starting over.

A surprising number of online forms cap PDF uploads at around 200 KB: government portals, university application systems, job boards, visa applications, and bank KYC forms are the usual suspects. If you've ever scanned a signed form on your phone and ended up with a 4 MB PDF that a portal refuses to accept, this is the tool for that exact moment. Select the 200 KB preset, drop the file in, and the tool searches for the highest quality that still lands under the limit — you don't have to guess at quality percentages and re-export five times like you would in a desktop app.

The same applies to compressing a PDF to 100 KB, which some stricter portals require, especially for supporting documents like photographs of ID cards or single-page certificates. At 100 KB the tool usually has to reduce the render resolution as well as the JPEG quality, so expect visibly softer text on dense pages — a one-page scan typically survives the trip in readable shape, while a ten-page contract squeezed into 100 KB will not. The honest badge system tells you immediately whether the target was met or whether you got the closest possible size instead, so you never have to open the output and squint to find out what happened.

Most "compress PDF" tools are vague about what they do to your file. Here is exactly what this one does: it renders each page of your PDF to an image using pdf.js — the same engine Firefox uses to display PDFs — then re-encodes each page as a JPEG at a chosen quality, and rebuilds a new PDF with identical page dimensions from those images. The size savings come from two dials: the JPEG quality (how aggressively each page image is compressed) and the render resolution (how many pixels each page gets). In exact-size mode the tool walks a ladder of seven preset combinations of those two dials, from high quality down to very compact, and keeps the first result that fits under your target.

The important consequence — and the thing most tools won't say out loud — is that the output is a rasterized PDF. Each page becomes a picture of the original page. Text is no longer selectable, searchable, or copyable, and screen readers can't read it. For the most common reasons people compress PDFs — emailing a scan, uploading a signed form to a portal, sharing a contract copy for reference — that trade-off is completely fine, and it's the only way to hit hard size targets reliably. But if you need the text layer to survive — for archiving, accessibility, or later editing — a rasterizing compressor is the wrong tool, and you should keep the original file alongside the compressed copy.

Exact-size mode is the default because it matches how the problem actually shows up: a form says "maximum 500 KB" and you need the best-looking file that obeys it. You pick the number; the tool does the searching. It always tries the sharpest settings first, so if your document could fit under the target at high quality, you get high quality — it never degrades more than necessary.

Manual mode hands you the two dials directly: a JPEG quality slider from 20% to 90% and a page-resolution select from roughly 54 DPI to 144 DPI. This is the mode to use when there's no hard limit and you just want to reduce PDF file size sensibly — say, shrinking a 20 MB image-heavy deck to a few megabytes before emailing it. A good starting point is 60% quality at about 108 DPI: text stays comfortably readable on screen and file sizes typically drop by 70–90% for scanned documents. Because settings can be changed after the file is loaded, you can nudge the slider and watch the output size update until it feels right.

Real-world limits you're likely fighting, and a sensible preset for each:

When a portal states a limit, aim slightly below it — a "500 KB maximum" form is happiest with a 450 KB file. This tool always lands at or under the number you pick, never just above it.

• Split first, then compress. A 100 KB budget spread across 12 pages leaves about 8 KB per page — not enough for anything readable. If the portal accepts multiple files, use the split PDF tool to break the document up, then compress each part.
• Scan smart. If you control the scan, scan at 150–200 DPI in grayscale rather than 600 DPI color — you'll start from 10× less data and the compressor won't need to be as aggressive.
• Watch the "Closest possible" badge. If the target can't be met, the tool gives you its smallest readable attempt instead of silently failing — but check that output is still legible before submitting it anywhere official.
• Text-only PDFs are already small. A PDF exported from Word with no images is often just 50–200 KB of highly efficient text encoding. Rasterizing it can make it bigger — the tool warns you when that happens, and the honest answer is to keep your original.

A fair question with a short answer: because it usually doesn't help, and portals don't accept it. PDFs already store their images in compressed form (typically JPEG), and running an already-compressed file through ZIP shaves off a few percent at best — a 4 MB scan becomes a 3.9 MB archive, not a 200 KB one. Worse, an upload form that demands "PDF, max 500 KB" will reject a .zip file outright, and an email recipient on a locked-down corporate machine may not be able to open it. Real PDF size reduction has to happen inside the format — re-encoding the page images at a lower quality and resolution, exactly what this tool does — so the result is still a normal .pdf that opens everywhere and genuinely fits under the limit.

Yes — and for a concrete reason, not a marketing one. Every step of this compressor — parsing the PDF, rendering pages, encoding JPEGs, assembling the output — runs in JavaScript inside your browser tab. The file is read straight from your disk into browser memory using the File API and is never attached to a network request. Contracts, bank statements, medical records, and signed agreements never touch a server, which is a meaningful difference from upload-based compressors where your document sits on someone else's machine, subject to their retention policy, while being processed. It also means the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded, and there is no per-day quota — there's no server capacity to ration.

• Applicants squeezing scanned certificates, transcripts, and ID documents under portal limits — the classic "compress PDF to 200 KB" scenario.
• Job seekers keeping a designed, image-heavy resume under an ATS upload cap without redesigning it.
• Freelancers and small businesses emailing signed contracts and multi-page proposals without bouncing off attachment limits.
• Field and admin teams shrinking phone-scanned paperwork — delivery notes, inspection reports, receipts — before filing them in a CRM or ERP that caps upload sizes.
• Students submitting assignments and lab reports to learning platforms with strict per-file limits.

If your document needs more than shrinking — reordering pages, pulling one section out, or adding a signature — the merge & organize tool and the sign PDF tool work the same private, in-browser way.