What PDF Compressor does
PDF Compressor maps Light, Balanced, and Strong choices to Ghostscript printer, ebook, and screen PDF settings. It also enables duplicate-image detection and font compression and subsetting while producing PDF 1.7 output.
Compression is a rewrite, not a guaranteed percentage reduction. Image-heavy documents often shrink more than text-only or already optimized PDFs; a result can show little change, become larger, or lose visual quality at stronger settings.
How to use PDF Compressor
- Choose one verified PDF no larger than 25 MB.
- Select Light for higher quality, Balanced for a middle ground, or Strong for the smallest target.
- Compress the file, compare size and appearance with the original, and download only after checking representative pages.
Important details
Presets trade image detail for size
Light uses Ghostscript's printer profile, Balanced uses ebook, and Strong uses screen. The profiles can downsample or recompress images differently; they are not exact target-size controls.
Rewriting can affect advanced PDF features
Ghostscript emits a new PDF and may change metadata, object structure, forms, color handling, fonts, and other advanced elements. Existing digital signatures should be expected to become invalid.
Practical uses
- Reduce an image-heavy PDF before a size-limited upload.
- Create a smaller review copy while retaining the original master.
- Compare three quality levels for routine web distribution.
Privacy and limitations
The PDF is sent to PagesTools for temporary Ghostscript processing. Input and output working files are deleted when the response finishes, fails, or is cancelled, and the response is marked no-store.
Input is capped at 25 MB, output at 50 MB, and processing at 55 seconds. Compression is not guaranteed, active or malformed PDFs are rejected, there is no exact-size target, and stronger presets can reduce image quality or alter advanced document structures.