How to make a PDF smaller for email and online forms

"File too large." Most of us have seen that message just before a deadline. The fix is to make the PDF smaller. Here is how to do it, and what to expect.

Shrink a PDF in four steps

1. Open Compress PDF.
2. Choose your file. It can be up to 25 MB.
3. Pick a level (explained below). Start with Balanced.
4. Press Compress file. The page tells you the old size, the new size and how much smaller it got. Then download it.

Everything happens in your browser, so your file is not uploaded anywhere.

Which level should you pick?

Lossless keeps your text as real text. You can still select and search it. The saving is usually small.

Balanced turns each page into a picture at about 100 dpi. The file gets much smaller. The text stays easy to read on screen, but you can no longer select or search it.

Smallest does the same at about 72 dpi. It makes the smallest file, but small print may look soft.

The tool keeps whichever result is smaller. If none of them is smaller than your original, it tells you so and does not give you a bigger file.

My form says "under 200 KB". What now?

There is no box where you type a target size. Do this instead:

1. Compress with Balanced and look at the new size.
2. Still too big? Run the original again with Smallest.
3. Still too big? The PDF probably has many pages. Take out the pages you do not need with Split PDF (use "Extract pages into one file"), then compress again.

Scanned documents are the usual problem. A scan is a big picture on every page. If you can, scan at a lower quality, or use black and white mode on your scanner app.

Why did my file not get smaller?

Some PDFs are already as small as they can be. A one-page text document of 80 KB has little left to remove. In that case the tool says the file is already well compressed. That is an honest answer, not an error.

When not to compress

• If you need to copy text from the PDF later, keep the original too. Balanced and Smallest turn text into a picture.
• If you are printing the document, use Lossless or keep the original. Small print can look blurry on paper after heavy compression.
• If the document is a legal or official copy, keep the original untouched and send the compressed one only where size is a problem.

Email limits in plain words

Most email services accept attachments up to about 20 to 25 MB in total. Several files together count as one total. If you have a few PDFs to send, you can also join them first with Merge PDF and compress the one file.

Free tries

You can compress up to three files a day without registering. Registration is free and removes the daily limit.