Compress PDF

Reduce PDF file size by optimizing structure and removing unnecessary metadata.

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Frequently Asked Questions

DocForge optimizes the internal PDF structure using object streams and removes unnecessary metadata to reduce file size. All processing happens in your browser.
The compression is lossless — it optimizes the PDF structure without degrading text, images, or vector graphics.
Results vary by file. PDFs with embedded fonts and metadata can see 10-40% reduction. Already-optimized PDFs may see minimal savings.
No hard limit, but files over 100MB may be slow since everything runs in your browser's memory.
No. All compression happens in your browser using pdf-lib. Your file never leaves your device.

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Pro Tip

For maximum compression, consider splitting large PDFs first, compressing each part, then merging them back.

Why Are PDF Files So Large?

The most common source of PDF bloat is embedded images. When you scan a document at 600 DPI and save as PDF, each page might be 5-10MB of image data alone. A 20-page scanned report can easily hit 100MB. For most screen reading, 150 DPI is visually identical to 600 DPI — so there's a 16× file size reduction waiting with no perceptible quality loss.

Fonts embedded in PDFs also contribute to file size. A PDF with 10 unique fonts might embed 2-3MB of font data. Subsetting (embedding only the characters actually used in the document) reduces this significantly — but some PDF creators embed the full font regardless. Removing or subsetting unused fonts is one of the compression steps our tool performs automatically.

Other sources: duplicate objects (some PDF creators include multiple copies of the same image or resource), unused objects left from editing, metadata bloat from embedded thumbnails and full-resolution previews. After compression, you can further reduce size by splitting the PDF to send only the pages you need.