Useful Hacks

Compress PDF

Reduce PDF file size by rendering pages as compressed images.

Processed locally in your browser. Each page is rendered and re-compressed as a JPEG image, which means text is no longer selectable in the output — this works best for scanned documents and image-heavy PDFs, not text documents you need to keep searchable.

Overview

Reduces PDF file size by rendering every page to an image and re-encoding it as a compressed JPEG. This is a real, effective way to shrink scanned or photo-heavy PDFs, but because pages become images, text in the output is no longer selectable or searchable.

How to use it

  1. 1Upload a PDF.
  2. 2Choose a compression quality.
  3. 3Download the compressed file and compare the size reduction.

How it works

Each page is rendered to a canvas with PDF.js at a resolution suited to screen/print viewing, re-encoded as a JPEG at your chosen quality, then reassembled into a new PDF with pdf-lib.

Tips

  • Best for scanned documents, photos and image-heavy pages — you'll see a large size reduction.
  • If your PDF is mostly typed text you need to keep selectable and searchable, this tool isn't the right fit — the output will look identical but the text won't be selectable.

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