Drop PDFs to compress to 300 KBAdd PDFs to compress to 300 KB
Fit a PDF under 300 KB with the gentlest settings that work.
or paste with CtrlCommandV PDF
Your files never leave your deviceAbout this tool
A PDF to 300 KB compressor that keeps the text sharp
Each PDF is made at most 300 KB, with the gentlest settings that fit. A 3.2 MB scanned form came out at 213 KB, its pictures at 150 dpi at quality 85. 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 300 KB means for a PDF
300 KB leaves room for pictures that stay sharp on a screen. a form scanned at 300 dpi (3.2 MB) comes out at 213 KB, its pictures at 150 dpi and quality 85; a phone photo on three A4 pages (5.2 MB) comes out at 296 KB, its pictures at 150 dpi and quality 84; a report with a logo, a chart, a photo and a signature (4.7 MB) comes out at 260 KB, its pictures at 300 dpi and quality 85.
Our report with its logo, chart, photo and signature settled on 300 dpi at quality 85. It is a common limit for forms, and for attachments sent to systems that count bytes.
How a PDF reaches 300 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 300 KB our phone photo PDF settled on 150 dpi at quality 84, and the scanned form on 150 dpi at quality 85.
300 KB here means 300,000 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 300 KB PDF
The search stops at the gentlest setting that fits, so a PDF that fits easily may come out well under 300 KB. If your PDF is already under the limit, its pictures are left untouched and only the way the file is packed changes.
How it works
-
Step 1:Add your PDFs
Drop them in or choose them from your device. Each one shows its first page.
-
Step 2:Compress to 300 KB
The limit is already set in the panel. Press Compress when you’re ready; nothing changes before that.
-
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
Why is my PDF smaller than 300 KB when I asked for 300 KB?
Because the next step up in quality would have gone over. Our scanned form came out at 213 KB, not at 300 KB, for that reason, and still had its best setting for the limit.
Should I use 300 KB or 200 KB for a document with photos?
Use the larger one when you can. Our phone photo PDF kept 150 dpi at quality 84 here, against 150 dpi at quality 72 at 200 KB, and photographs show the difference more than scanned text does.
Can I compress several PDFs to 300 KB at once?
Yes. Add them all, set the limit once and press Compress: every PDF gets its own search for the gentlest settings that fit, and you save them one by one or as a .zip.
Compress a PDF to a size
These pages open Compress PDF with the size already set.
Text stays sharp.Under 300 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.