Compress PDF to Under 10 MB
or drop files here
10 MB is the practical ceiling for email attachments. If a document is bouncing back from Gmail or Outlook, this is the target that fixes it.
Can every PDF reach 10 MB?
Reaching 10 MB almost always happens at the lightest setting, so the document is barely altered. Very large scanned archives are the main exception, and those benefit most from compression anyway.
Email attachments
Gmail and Outlook cap messages at 25 MB, but many corporate servers reject anything over 10 MB.
Presentation decks
Slide exports are dominated by images and usually shrink dramatically.
Scanned archives
Multi-hundred page scans come down enormously without becoming unreadable.
Smaller, without flattening your text.
Most compressors reach a size target by turning every page into a picture. That works, and it destroys the document: the text stops being text, so it can no longer be searched, copied, read aloud or parsed by an applicant tracking system.
Measure the real size
Each image is checked against the size it is actually drawn at on the page. A photo placed two inches wide needs a fraction of the pixels it is usually stored with.
Try several encodings
Every image is encoded more than one way, and the smallest result that still looks right is kept. Flat diagrams and photographs need different codecs, so neither is forced into the wrong one.
Stop at the first fit
Settings get progressively stronger until the file is under 10 MB, then it stops. You keep as much quality as the limit allows rather than always getting the harshest setting.
Need a different size?
Pick the limit you actually have to meet, or set any figure you like on the main compressor.
Questions answered.
My email still bounced after compressing to 10 MB. Why?
How does it hit an exact size?
Will the text still be selectable and searchable?
Is my file uploaded anywhere?
What if the target cannot be reached?
More tools you might need.
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