Compress a PDF without losing quality

There are two ways to shrink a PDF. The first rewrites its internal structure — compressing objects, dropping duplicates and clearing metadata — without touching the content: nothing at all is lost and the text stays selectable and searchable. That is what this page does.

The second renders pages as images and lowers their quality. It shrinks far more, but text stops being text. That only makes sense when there is a hard size limit to meet; the exact-size pages cover that.

How much lossless saves depends on the file: an already-optimized PDF barely moves, while one exported from Word or full of repeated objects can shrink a lot. We never hand back a file larger than the original.