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Fit a PDF under 100 KB with the gentlest settings that work.
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Your files never leave your deviceAbout this tool
A PDF to 100 KB compressor that keeps the text sharp
Each PDF is made at most 100 KB, with the gentlest settings that fit. A 3.2 MB scanned form came out at 98.6 KB, its pictures at 120 dpi at quality 73. If it can’t get that small at a readable quality, you get the smallest copy and a note. It stays on your device.
What 100 KB means for a PDF
100 KB holds a page or two of scanned text at screen resolution. a form scanned at 300 dpi (3.2 MB) comes out at 98.6 KB, its pictures at 120 dpi and quality 73; a phone photo on three A4 pages (5.2 MB) comes out at 92 KB, its pictures at 120 dpi and quality 58; a report with a logo, a chart, a photo and a signature (4.7 MB) comes out at 64.4 KB, its pictures at 150 dpi and quality 85.
This is the size where a scanned page is still easy to read and a photo is still recognisable, which is why so many forms and portals ask for it. Compress PDF stops at the first settings that fit, so a file that could stay sharper does.
How a PDF reaches 100 KB
Compress PDF tries the gentlest settings first and goes down a step at a time until the file fits: pictures at up to 300 dpi and high quality, then lower. Text and drawings are never touched. For 100 KB our phone photo PDF settled on 120 dpi at quality 58, and the scanned form on 120 dpi at quality 73.
100 KB here means 100,000 bytes, the stricter way to read it, so a file that passes here passes a limit counted in KiB too. The floor is 72 dpi at quality 30: below that pictures stop being readable, so the PDF stays bigger than the limit and says so.
Before you send a 100 KB PDF
Expect pictures to come down to 120 dpi or so at this size. Printed on paper they look soft; on a screen, at the size the page is shown, they hold up. A scan with a text layer keeps that layer, so it still searches.
How it works
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Step 1:Add your PDFs
Drop them in or choose them from your device. Each one shows its first page.
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Step 2:Compress to 100 KB
The limit is already set in the panel. Press Compress when you’re ready; nothing changes before that.
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Step 3:Check the size and save
Each PDF shows the size it reached. Save one file, or all of them as a .zip.
Questions, answered
How many scanned pages fit in 100 KB?
It depends on the page. Our two scanned A4 pages together came to 98.6 KB at 120 dpi at quality 73. Pages that are mostly white paper compress much further than pages full of photographs.
Will a photo still be recognisable at 100 KB?
Yes. The 12-megapixel photo in our test PDF came to 92 KB at 120 dpi at quality 58: soft when you zoom in, clear at the size the page shows it.
Why did my PDF come out a little under 100 KB and not exactly 100 KB?
Compress PDF takes the gentlest settings that fit, and the next gentler step would have gone over the limit. It then tries other qualities at the same resolution to use the room, but a step can leave a lot of it: the report in our tests, with its small pictures, came out well under the limit at the gentlest settings that fit.
Compress a PDF to a size
These pages open Compress PDF with the size already set.
Text stays sharp.Under 100 KB
Compress by
We use the gentlest settings that fit. If a PDF can’t get that small at a quality you can read, you get the smallest we can make, and it says so.
What changes
Only pictures change: they come down to the size they’re shown at and are saved again. Text, vector drawings, links, bookmarks and form fields stay exactly as they are. The file is repacked too, so even a PDF without pictures can get smaller. Page thumbnails go, and so does the editing data some design apps keep inside a PDF: a PDF saved from Illustrator can’t be opened again as an editable Illustrator file.
PDFs with a password or a digital signature are left as they are: compressing them would remove the protection or break the signature.