Give it a number — 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB, anything — and it compresses your PDF just enough to fit: gentlest settings first, escalating only as needed, with a visible log of what it tried. If the target is impossible for your document, it says so instead of pretending.
How to compress a PDF to a target size
- Drop your PDF and set the target in KB (or tap a preset).
- Click compress — watch it walk down the quality ladder until the file fits.
- Download, and check the attempt log if you’re curious what it took.
Built for the upload-cap fight
Somewhere right now a form is rejecting a 1.8 MB scan with “maximum file size: 500 KB”. Job portals, visa and government applications, bank KYC uploads, university admissions, court e-filing — all enforce hard caps that ordinary compressors can only gamble at: you compress, check, compress again, check again. This tool runs that loop for you, deterministically, and stops at the best quality that fits rather than the smallest possible file.
The ladder, explained
Attempts start where quality costs least: re-encoding the embedded images (photos, scans) at progressively lower quality and resolution while text stays perfectly sharp and selectable. Only when no image-level setting can reach the target does it escalate to re-rendering whole pages at decreasing DPI — the nuclear option that always works but turns text into image. Every attempt is listed with its resulting size, so the process is auditable, and the escalation is skipped entirely when an early rung already overshoots hopelessly (no wasted work).
Honest failure beats fake success
Some targets genuinely can’t be met — a 60-page contract will not become 100 KB in any readable form. When that happens you still get the smallest achievable file and its real size, plus the two moves that actually work: raise the target, or split the PDF and compress the sections separately. For size reduction without a specific cap, the plain compressor is simpler; if the document only needs to print smaller, grayscale or smaller pages may serve better.
Common size caps
Three caps cover most portals. Once your PDF is loaded, tap a preset — or open the tool with one already selected: 100 KB, 200 KB, 500 KB.
100 KB — single-page forms and certificates
The strictest common cap. Budget math keeps expectations honest: roughly 30–50 KB of image data per page for one to three pages — enough for a clean, legible scan at screen resolution. Passport photos, single-page certificates, signature pages, and one-page forms fit well; long documents at readable quality cannot. If the smallest achievable size is still above 100 KB, split the PDF into the pages the portal actually asked for — that, not more compression, is the fix.
200 KB — resumes, job and admission portals
The classic recruitment and admissions cap: resumes, per-document university uploads, scholarship and exam-registration forms. The document is usually fine — the images inside it are oversized, typically a phone photo of a certificate embedded at full camera resolution. A text-based resume fits after a simple repack, and re-encoding embedded scans at document resolution routinely cuts 70–90% with no visible difference in a review portal.
500 KB — e-filing, assignments, claims
The roomiest standard cap — court e-filing, assignment uploads, claim portals. At sensible scan quality it holds 10–20 pages, and a mostly-text document with a few figures fits with margin. Files that miss it are carrying camera-resolution photos or 600 DPI colour scans, which the first rungs of the ladder remove — so this target is usually met without the page re-rendering fallback, and text stays sharp and selectable.
Private by design
The search loop — every attempt, every re-encode — runs on your device. The ID scans and signed forms that these portals demand are exactly the files that should never transit a stranger’s server, and here they don’t.