How to reduce PDF file size without losing quality

1 min read·25 July 2026

Making a large PDF smaller is useful for email, storage, or uploading. With PDFrust you compress PDFs directly in your browser — you choose the quality level yourself, so the file size drops while text and images stay readable.

Why is a PDF so large?

PDFs become large due to embedded high-resolution images, embedded fonts, or scanned pages as bitmaps. Compression mainly targets images: their resolution is reduced or they are recompressed to JPEG.

Choosing quality levels

PDFrust offers three compression levels: low (smallest file, visible quality loss), medium (good balance), and high (minimal loss, less compression). For email and uploading the medium level is usually enough.

Compress PDF

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Text and vectors stay intact

Only images in the PDF are compressed. Text, vector graphics, and form fields remain fully intact and selectable. The PDF structure does not change.

How much smaller will the PDF get?

That depends on the content. PDFs that mainly consist of images (such as scanned documents) can become up to 80% smaller. PDFs with few images and lots of text barely shrink.