Compress PDF Online — Free

PDF size is almost always an image problem. A page of pure text costs 10–50 KB because text is stored as compact font-and-character instructions. One scanned page at 600 DPI can exceed 2 MB — a 35-megapixel photograph of text. Embedded photos, fully-embedded fonts, and unflattened form layers add the rest. That is why the same "compress" button shrinks a scanned lease by 85% and a text-only contract by barely 10%: there is simply more redundant image data to remove in the scan.

Lossless Cleanup rewrites the file structure: it strips metadata bloat, removes duplicate and unused objects, and recompresses content streams. Nothing visible changes and text stays selectable — expect a safe 5–20%.

Balanced and Maximum Compression re-render each page as a JPEG image at 150 DPI and 96 DPI respectively. Screens display ~96–150 effective DPI, so a Balanced file looks essentially identical on screen while carrying a fraction of the pixels. The trade-off is real: re-rendered pages are pictures, so text is no longer selectable or searchable. Choose by destination — Lossless for documents people will edit or search, Balanced for email, Maximum for hard portal caps.

Compression removes redundancy, not content. When a portal demands 1–2 MB and Maximum mode lands at 6 MB, the megabytes that remain are pages. Delete scan cover sheets and blank backs with the Delete Pages tool, extract only the range the recipient needs, or split the document into parts — then compress the smaller file. This structural-first approach is how large scan batches reliably get under strict government-portal and job-application limits.