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DontTouch My Doc.
DontTouchMyDoc / Tool · 03

Compress PDF.

When your scanner gave you a 90 MB file and the upload form accepts 5. Pick a level, hit compress. The tool re-renders and re-encodes every page inside your browser — then hands you a smaller file, with no trip to a server.

Privacy · Enforced No sign-up No watermarks No page limits

Drop a PDF here.

Or . We shrink by re-encoding images locally. Nothing uploads.

§01b · Use cases

When you'd want this.

If your PDF came out of a scanner, chances are it's far bigger than the form you're trying to upload it to.

  • Email · 25 MB

    Email attachment caps.

    Gmail and Outlook cut you off around 25 MB. A quick compress turns "your message bounced" into "sent".

  • Portals · 5–10 MB

    Upload forms with strict limits.

    Job applications, tax portals, court e-filing, visa sites and insurance claims often cap attachments at 5–10 MB.

  • Scans · 1–5 MB/page

    Scanners produce monsters.

    Office scanners default to 300 DPI colour — a 20-page contract easily weighs 50–100 MB before anyone gets to read it.

  • Mobile · 10× smaller

    Slow connections & mobile data.

    Shaving a 40 MB file to 4 MB turns a painful upload on hotel Wi-Fi or 4G into an instant one.

  • Storage · back in the black

    Storage tiers fill up fast.

    Your 5 GB of free Drive space vanishes when you keep scanning bank statements. Smaller files, longer runway.

  • Basic manners

    Sharing with a human.

    Before you Slack a 200 MB receipts PDF at your accountant, think about their inbox. They'll thank you.

If your PDF came from Word, Pages or Google Docs, it's probably already small — compression won't help much, and you can skip this tool.

§02 · Procedure

How compression happens.

Three steps. None of them involve a server.

  1. Step 01 1

    Drop the PDF.

    Load the file — we count pages, note original size, and keep it all in-memory.

  2. Step 02 2

    Choose the level.

    Light, medium or heavy. Each preset trades a bit of fidelity for a lot of size.

  3. Step 03 3

    Compress & download.

    We re-render and re-embed pages as JPEG inside a fresh PDF, then hand you the result — no servers touched.

§04 · FAQ

Compress PDF · FAQ.

Short answers. Anything missing? Tell us.

How does the compression work?
We render each page via PDF.js, re-encode it as a JPEG at your chosen quality, then rebuild the PDF using pdf-lib. Results are dramatic on image-heavy PDFs and scans.

Will the text still be searchable?
No — because we flatten pages to images, selectable text becomes visual text. This is great for scans and receipts, less ideal for contracts you need to grep.

What do the levels mean?
Light: 1.8× render, ~85% JPEG quality. Medium (default): 1.4×, ~72% quality. Heavy: 1.0×, ~55% quality. The higher the preset, the smaller the output.

Sometimes my file barely shrinks — why?
If your PDF is already a compact vector-only document (like a modern export from Word or Pages), the image pipeline can't do much better. Try a higher level, or just don't compress.

Is anything sent to a server?
No. Like every tool here, compression runs fully inside your browser tab. The 'network' indicator in the sidebar stays idle throughout.
§05 · See also

Other tools.

Merge PDFs.

Combine files, keep your order.

Split PDF.

Pull pages out, one or in ranges.

Organise pages.

Rearrange, rotate, delete.

Redact PDF.

Black out sensitive bits, for real.

Remove line numbers.

Clean up court transcripts.