How to compress a PDF for email without wrecking quality

Shrink a PDF for email or portal caps in your browser. Balanced mode keeps text selectable; Maximum goes smallest.

  1. Open Compress PDF and add your file.
  2. Pick Balanced to hit a size target with the least quality loss — text stays selectable.
  3. Or pick Maximum if you need the smallest file and can accept pages as images.
  4. Compress, compare the before/after sizes, then download.

Balanced requantises photos in the JPEG coefficient domain when possible — it does not decode and re-encode every image for a generation loss.

When the file will not shrink

Some PDFs are already lean. The tool reports the real saving instead of faking a reduction. Try Maximum only if you accept losing selectable text.