Compress PDF for Printing

Standard office laser printing looks clean from 150 DPI upward. Professional offset printing and photographic reproduction want 300 DPI. Our Less Compression preset targets about 200 DPI, a deliberate middle ground that suits the overwhelming majority of everyday printing.

No. Page dimensions, orientation, margins and bleed boxes are preserved exactly. Only the internal encoding of images and streams changes — the physical geometry of every page is identical to your original.

For everyday jobs, yes. For high-end offset work with spot colours, ICC profiles or CMYK-critical artwork, verify the output with your printer first — any recompression can theoretically shift colour handling, and professional shops usually prefer the untouched source file.

Less Compression favours quality with images near 200 DPI. Recommended is the balanced default at roughly 144 DPI. Extreme maximises size reduction at about 96 DPI. Target Size ignores presets entirely and searches for the best quality that fits your specified limit.

Compression is one-way, but your original file is never modified — it stays exactly where it was on your device. The compressed version is written as a separate download, so you always retain the source and can simply try again with a gentler preset.

Progress tracks pages completed, not time elapsed, and pages differ enormously in cost. A page holding one large photograph takes far longer than ten pages of plain text, so the bar appears to stall. It is still working — the Web Worker keeps the interface responsive throughout.

Yes, and this is usually desirable. Author names, the originating software, revision history, comment threads and XMP blocks are stripped. That reduces file size and removes information you may not want to share — a genuine privacy benefit when sending documents externally.

Not while it is encrypted. A protected PDF has its content streams encrypted, so the compressor cannot read the images it needs to optimize. Remove the password in your PDF reader first, compress, then re-apply protection to the smaller output if you still need it.

Rarely, and it is usually counterproductive. The first pass already removes structural waste and downsamples images; a second pass mostly re-encodes already-degraded JPEGs, which loses more quality for negligible gain. Prefer a stronger preset on the original file instead.

Yes. Drop in as many files as you like and they are queued automatically. Processing is deliberately sequential rather than parallel: compressing several large PDFs simultaneously would compete for memory and can crash the browser tab, so each file is handled in turn.