Job ticket · PDF bench
Forms and portals ask for a PDF under a hard limit. Pick the file, pick the limit, and this page works to land under it, showing you the exact size it reached. Everything runs in your browser; the file is never uploaded.
Drop a PDF on the tray, or click to pick one
PDF · it stays on this device
Presets for the common doors: 200 KB for tight form portals, 500 KB for most uploads, 2 MB for email and course sites. Your last target is remembered in this browser.
Pick a PDF to begin.
The page opens your PDF, finds the photos stored inside it, and probes the biggest one to pick a size and quality setting. It then recompresses every photo at that setting, rebuilds the file, and weighs the result. If it is still over your target it steps down a rung and tries again, a few times at most. On our test bench, an 11.65 MB photo PDF landed under 2 MB, 500 KB and 200 KB targets every time.
We shrink PDFs by recompressing the images inside them and tidying the file. A PDF that is already tightly compressed may not get much smaller. We always show you the before and after size, and if we could not make it smaller, we say so and give you back your original. Photos stored in formats other than JPEG are left as they are in this version, and the result line tells you when that happened.
Most of a photo-heavy PDF is the photos inside it. This page reads those photos, recompresses them at a smaller size and quality chosen from a quick probe of your file, rebuilds the PDF, and checks the result against your target. The exact final size is shown before you download.
A PDF that is already tightly compressed, or one made only of text, has nothing for this method to squeeze. Re-saving a text PDF can even add a few bytes. When that happens the page says so and gives you back your original file, unchanged.
The photos inside are recompressed, so at small targets they get softer, and the page shows the size and quality setting it used. Text and drawings stay exactly as they were.
Nowhere. It is read into this page and processed in your browser. Watch the network panel while it works if you want to check.