Make a heavy PDF small enough to email. Your file never leaves this tab.
This works by re-rendering the pages, so know what it is good at.
The usual reason a PDF is enormous is that it is a scan — big photographs
of pages at a far higher resolution than anyone needs. This re-renders each page
at a sensible size and re-compresses it, which on a scan can cut the file by ten
times. The text is laid back over each page invisibly, so you can still select
and search it.
On a PDF that is already mostly crisp vector text, this will help little
or may even make it larger — there is nothing oversized to shrink. So it
shows you the before and after and lets you keep the original if it won. It never
overwrites anything; you download a new file.
1. Open a PDF
Drop a PDF here, or click to chooseNothing is uploaded — it is opened inside this tab
2. How hard to squeeze
— leave this on unless the PDF is a pure scan with no real text anyway.
The honest notes
Nothing is uploaded. Static page, no endpoint, no account. The PDF is rendered and rewritten in your browser.
It re-renders; it does not optimise in place. Every page becomes a re-compressed image with an invisible text layer over it. That is what shrinks a scan dramatically — and what makes it the wrong tool for a document that was already efficient vector text, where it will show no gain and you keep the original.
Nothing is thrown away silently. It reports the before and after size, and if the result is not smaller it says so. You choose which to download.
Fonts and vector art become pixels. A shrunk page is an image, so zooming in far enough shows softness a vector PDF would not. At Light strength on a normal document that is hard to notice; at Strong on a dense page it is visible.
Big documents use memory and time. Each page is rendered at full size before being compressed, so a 300-page scan is real work for a phone. It runs a page at a time so the tab does not freeze.