Compress PDF to an Exact KB Size
Shrink a PDF to a target file size in KB for online forms and portals with strict upload limits — processed on your device, never uploaded.
In short
To compress a PDF to a fixed size like 100KB or 200KB, the pages are re-rendered as JPEG images at reduced quality and rebuilt into a new PDF. This reliably meets portal upload limits but removes selectable text.
Who this is for: Anyone who must upload a PDF under a strict size limit and does not need the text to stay selectable.
How this PDF compressor works
This tool re-renders every page of your PDF as a compressed JPEG image, then rebuilds a new, smaller PDF from those images — entirely in your browser. It repeats this at lower quality/resolution until it gets as close as possible to your target size.
Important trade-off: because pages become images, any selectable/searchable text in the original PDF becomes a picture of text in the output. This works well for scanned documents, forms and image-heavy PDFs, but is not ideal if you need to keep text selectable, searchable or copyable — for those, a text-preserving compressor (which recompresses embedded images without rasterising the whole page) is a better fit.
Nothing is uploaded to any server — the whole process runs on your device using your browser's PDF rendering engine.
See also: Resize & Compress Image to an Exact KB Size, HEIC to JPG Converter.
When to use this
Great fit — these are usually already image-based, so converting to a compressed JPEG-based PDF loses little, and you can hit strict portal upload limits (e.g. 200KB, 500KB) reliably.
Less ideal — text will no longer be selectable after compression. Consider reducing embedded images in the source document instead, or accepting the trade-off if file size matters more than searchability for this use case.
Assumptions
- Each page is rendered to an image and rebuilt as a new PDF; text becomes non-selectable.
- Quality and scale are reduced iteratively until the target size is met or the minimum quality is reached.
- Nothing is uploaded.
Frequently asked questions
Will my PDF still be searchable after compression?
No — every page becomes a flattened image, so text is no longer selectable or searchable. This is a deliberate trade-off to reach small target sizes reliably.
Why didn't it exactly hit my target size?
The tool tries several quality/resolution combinations and stops after a few attempts to keep processing time reasonable, picking the closest result. Very low targets (e.g. under 50KB) on multi-page documents may not be fully reachable while text stays legible.
Is there a page limit?
No hard limit, but very large PDFs (50+ pages) will take longer to process since every page is rendered and re-encoded in your browser.
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
No — everything happens locally in your browser tab.
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