How to use it
- Drop your PDF onto the box below.
- Type the size you need and pick KB or MB.
- Press Process files and download the result, which is guaranteed to be measured against your target.
How the target is reached
Every page is redrawn as an image and re-encoded as JPEG, then the pages are assembled into a fresh PDF at the original page size. There is a ladder of fourteen resolution and quality settings, from 200 dpi at high quality down to 48 dpi, and the tool binary-searches it: it renders the middle rung, checks the real output size, and moves up or down until it finds the highest quality that lands under your number. Each rung is a full render, so a long document takes a few passes, but what you download is a file that was actually measured, never a prediction.
What cannot be shrunk
Some targets are simply out of reach. A 300-page scan will not fit in 200 KB at any quality a human can read, and a one-page PDF that is already 40 KB of text has nothing to give. When even the lowest rung is still above the target the tool says so plainly and hands you the smallest file it produced, rather than pretending. If the file is already under the target it is returned untouched.
The trade you are making
Because pages become pictures, text in the output can no longer be selected or searched, and vector drawings become pixels. That is a fair trade for a scan, which was only a picture to begin with, and a poor one for a contract you still need to search. For a modest reduction where text must stay live, use the ordinary PDF compressor instead and keep the original.
Questions
How close to the target will the result be?
As close as the ladder allows. The tool picks the highest quality rung that fits, so the file is usually well under the target rather than exactly on it.
Why did it take several passes?
Each candidate quality has to be rendered and measured for real, because JPEG size cannot be predicted reliably from the settings alone. A document of a few pages finishes in seconds.
Are password-protected PDFs supported?
No. An encrypted file cannot be opened without its password and will report an error. Remove the protection first.