Compress a PDF to 2MB without guessing at quality settings
You rarely need a PDF to be "smaller". You need it to compress to 2MB because a job portal says so, or to slip under the 10MB attachment cap on an email. Most compressors still ask for a quality level or a choice of low, medium and high, and you find out afterward whether it worked.
Quick PDF Compressor starts from the number. Under What it has to fit, choose Email attachment for under 10 MB, Upload form for under 5 MB, or Chat or message for under 2 MB. Press Compress and each document is tried at gentle settings first, then at progressively stronger ones, stopping at the first attempt that comes in under the limit. You spend no more image quality than the target actually requires.
If no one has given you a limit, pick As small as it goes. That runs one pass over every document, re-encoding its pictures at JPEG quality 70 at their full resolution, with no target to meet.
How to make a PDF smaller for a size limit, step by step
Select a document to see a bar comparing its new size with its old one, with a marker showing where the limit falls. The command bar totals what the batch saved, and the figures are measured from the files actually written, not estimated.
- Drag your PDFs or a folder onto the window, or select Add PDFs.
- Pick a target under What it has to fit. Documents that are over it get a flag in the queue straight away.
- Choose where to save: Beside the originals, Into a folder, or Replace the originals.
- Press Compress. Each row then reads old size, arrow, new size and the percentage taken off.
What happens when a PDF is too big to email
The size of most oversized PDFs is in photographs and scans. The app re-encodes only those pictures. It begins at JPEG quality 85 at full resolution, and each further step lowers quality by ten points and caps the long edge of each picture, from 2200 pixels down to 800 on the sixth and final step. Text, vector drawings and fonts are not re-rendered, so words stay crisp at any zoom. Page content that was stored uncompressed is also repacked losslessly.
A few documents will not fit even at the last step, usually because their weight is in fonts or in images the app cannot re-encode. Those keep the result of the strongest step, and the summary counts how many would not go under the limit, so you know to split the file instead of sending it and having it bounce.
Files already under 5MB or 10MB are left alone
Run a mixed folder against a 5MB target and only the documents over 5MB are compressed. The rest are written out as exact copies, because compressing something that already fits would cost quality and gain nothing. The pane tells you how many are over the limit before you start, and says All under already when none are.
Every document it compresses also loses its document information dictionary and XMP packet, which takes the author name and the creating software out of a file you are about to send to strangers. The exact copies of files that already fit are left byte for byte as they were.
