How to Compress a PDF Offline (Without Uploading It)
Email limits and upload forms often reject big PDFs, especially scans and photo-heavy files. Many websites compress them on their servers. You can do it locally instead.
Step by step
- Open DIL and choose Compress PDF.
- Choose your PDF.
- Pick a quality: Balanced (good for email), High quality, or Smallest (screen reading only).
- Press Compress. DIL shows the before and after size and a download button.
In DIL: this is part of the full DIL, a one-time purchase. You can also try the free Lite version first.
Get DIL – $16 one-timeTry free LiteGood to know
- In one of our test files (a photo-heavy PDF) 3.51 MB became 568 KB.
- Compression works by re-saving each page as a picture. The file gets smaller, but text in the result can no longer be selected or searched.
- PDFs that are mostly text are already small. If DIL cannot make a file smaller it tells you, and your original is the best version.
- Everything runs on your device; nothing is uploaded.
Questions
Will the text still be readable?
Yes, as a picture of the page. At Balanced quality it is clear on screen and in print for normal documents.
Why can my PDF not be made smaller?
Text-based PDFs are usually already compact. Compression helps most with scans and PDFs full of photos.