Nookbyte Compress a PDF
Make PDFs smaller by shrinking the photos and scans inside them. Text and drawings stay sharp and searchable. Compress one file or a whole batch. Your files are compressed on this device and never uploaded.
Drop PDFs here
Add as many PDFs as you like, up to 250 MB each.
How to compress a PDF
- Drop your PDFs on the page, or choose them from your device. You can add many at once.
- Keep Standard and Medium for most files. Choose Low for the smallest files, or High to keep more detail.
- Check the new size of each file, then download them one at a time or all together in a zip file.
Standard or Strong?
Standard only changes the images inside the PDF, so the text stays real text that you can search, select and copy. That is what you want for contracts, invoices, forms and most documents. Strong redraws every page as a picture. It can shrink files that Standard cannot, such as PDFs full of complex drawings, but the text stops being text. Keep the original if you might need it later.
Questions
Are my files uploaded?
No. Your browser compresses the PDFs on this device, and they are never sent to Nookbyte or anyone else. The first time you add a file, the page downloads the free PDF library it needs to read and write PDFs.
How does it make a PDF smaller?
In most large PDFs, the photos and scans take up nearly all the space. Standard finds each image, works out how large it is shown on the page, and saves it again as a JPG at a resolution that still looks sharp at that size. It also compresses parts of the file that were stored without compression and removes leftover data that nothing uses.
Will the text stay sharp and searchable?
With Standard, yes. Text, fonts, drawings, links and form fields are not changed. Strong is different: it turns every page into a picture, so text can no longer be selected, searched or copied, and links stop working. Use Strong only when Standard does not make the file small enough.
Which image detail should I choose?
Medium (150 dpi) looks sharp on screens and is fine for most home printing. High (200 dpi) keeps more detail for printing photos. Low (100 dpi) makes the smallest files, for email attachments and upload limits. Under Fine-tune you can set the resolution and JPG quality yourself.
Why didn't my PDF get smaller?
A PDF that is mostly text and drawings, or whose images are already compressed, has little to remove. When the new file would not be smaller than the original, the tool keeps your original file and tells you.
Are any images left as they are?
Yes. Images in CMYK or other print colour spaces, black-and-white scans stored as 1-bit images, JPEG 2000 images and a few other special cases are kept exactly as they are, so their colours and quality do not change. Charts and screenshots that are already small are kept too, because JPG would make them look worse.
Can I compress a password-protected PDF?
No. Open the PDF in a PDF reader, save a copy without the password or permissions, then compress that copy.
Is there a size or file limit?
Each PDF can be up to 250 MB, and you can add as many files as you like. Large files need a lot of memory, so on a phone compress them one at a time.
PDFs are read and written with pdf-lib (MIT licence) and, for Strong, drawn with PDF.js (Apache 2.0 licence).