Compress PDF
Shrink any PDF — by quality preset, or to a specific target size like 200 KB or 2 MB.
- Encrypted in transit (TLS 1.3)
- Files auto-deleted in 60 minutes
- No signup required
Run Compress PDF
About Compress PDF
Most PDF compressors give you a single "smaller" button. We give you precision: pick a quality preset for everyday savings, or specify an exact target size and let our 12-rung quality ladder probe the smallest acceptable result.
Under the hood we run a free pikepdf re-save first (often -30 to -80 % on bloated source PDFs), then a Ghostscript downsample ladder, with a rasterise-and-rebuild fallback for extreme targets. The output is always the highest-quality file that fits.
How Compress PDF works
Three steps. Done in seconds.
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1
Drop your PDF
Any PDF up to your plan's file size cap.
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2
Pick a preset OR a target size
Low/Medium/High for one-click savings, or specify e.g. 200 KB and an optional minimum-quality floor.
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3
Download the result
We report the achieved size and the compression ratio.
Why Compress PDF on Pixenith
Built for serious work. Free for everyday use.
Privacy first
Encrypted in transit, processed in isolated workers, deleted within 60 minutes.
Lightning fast
Most jobs finish in under 5 seconds. Heavy ones run on dedicated worker pools.
Production engine
Powered by pikepdf, Ghostscript, Tesseract OCR, ONNX models — the same tech the pros use.
Free, no signup
Generous daily limits on the free plan. Upgrade only if you need bigger files.
Related PDF tools
Often used alongside Compress PDF.
- Repair PDF Fix corrupt or damaged PDFs by rebuilding them.
- Merge PDF Combine multiple PDFs into a single document in the order you choose.
- Split PDF Split a PDF into single pages, by page ranges, or by target file size.
- OCR PDF Add a searchable text layer to scanned PDFs (Tesseract).
- PDF to PDF/A Convert PDF to the archival PDF/A standard.
- Add watermark Stamp a text watermark across every page.
Compress PDF — frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know.
How small can I shrink a PDF?
Surprisingly small. We can take a 50 MB image-heavy PDF below 200 KB by stepping down DPI, JPEG quality and finally rasterising the whole document. The trade-off is image sharpness — set a minimum-quality floor if you need to preserve detail.
Will text stay sharp?
Yes for text-heavy PDFs. The compression path stops short of rasterising unless you've requested a target size that can't be met any other way.
What does "Medium / ebook" actually do?
Runs Ghostscript's ``/ebook`` preset, downsampling images to 150 DPI and re-encoding via JPEG at ~80 % quality. Good balance for most use cases.
Why does my 100-page text PDF not compress much?
Text content is already extremely compact in PDF. There's little to gain unless the document also has embedded fonts that can be subsetted, or images that can be downsampled.
Is the result still a valid PDF?
Yes. We use industry-standard Ghostscript output paths — every result is linearised, valid PDF 1.7.