PDF Guides

How to Compress a PDF Without Losing Readability

Why PDFs get large

Scanned pages, embedded photos and unoptimized fonts are the main causes of oversized PDFs. Compression re-encodes embedded images at a lower effective resolution and removes redundant data.

Steps

• Open Compress PDF
• Upload your PDF
• Click Compress - the server uses Ghostscript to re-encode the document
• Compare the reported sizes, then download

An honest note on results

Already-optimized or small PDFs may not shrink further. Files Office never returns a "compressed" file that is larger than the original - if compression would grow the file, you get the original back instead.

If you need it smaller

• Use Split PDF to send only the pages that matter
• Convert image-heavy pages to grayscale by re-scanning in Grayscale mode
• Re-generate scanned documents at a lower quality setting

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