Compress PDF to 1 MB

Email services cap attachments (often at 10–25 MB in total, and many company servers at much less), and upload forms commonly accept files of only 1 or 2 MB. This tool compresses a PDF towards the size you set — 1 MB by default, or any value in KB or MB — and stops as soon as the file fits, so you keep as much quality as the limit allows. It aims for 1,000,000 bytes per MB, which also satisfies sites that count 1 MB as 1,048,576 bytes. The PDF is processed on your own device.

How to use this tool

1. Choose the PDF (or several: each is compressed on its own).
2. Keep 1 MB or type your limit, for example 2 MB or 700 KB.
3. Tick greyscale for black-and-white scans; untick "turn pages into images" if the text must stay selectable.
4. Download the file and check "Target reached".

Formula

The tool tries three stages in order and stops at the first that fits: (1) lossless clean-up — unused objects removed, uncompressed streams compressed; (2) photos re-encoded as JPEG, searching from 150 dpi at 80% quality down to 30 dpi at 20% for the best setting that fits; (3) each page rendered to a JPEG image, using sample pages to pick the setting.

A setting is accepted only after the real file has been saved and measured. Images that would grow are left untouched, and text and vector drawings are never recompressed in stages 1 and 2.

Example

A 14-page brochure of 8.4 MB with large photos: the clean-up saves 0.2 MB, then image recompression finds that 110 dpi at 60% quality gives 0.93 MB — under the 1 MB target — while all the text stays sharp and selectable. With a 2 MB target it would stop at 150 dpi and 80% instead.