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Practical ways to shrink a PDF

Recompress images, drop unused pages, and flatten embedded fonts to turn "too big to email" PDFs into sub-10 MB files.

By FileHint editorial teamSupervised by Netwiz LLCEditorial policy

Figure out what's heavy

  • Most bloat comes from embedded images. Downsampling them has the biggest impact.
  • OCR-layered scans often add substantial overhead too.

Mac Preview quick compress

  1. File > Export > Format: PDF.
  2. Set Quartz Filter to Reduce File Size.
  3. Expect a quality drop, still readable.

Windows (Word > Save As)

  • Save in "Standard (online)" mode to downsample images automatically.

Ghostscript (CLI)

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -o out.pdf in.pdf
  • /screen, /ebook, /printer, /prepress trade off quality vs size in that order.

Hitting email size caps

  • Start by downsampling images by ~20%.
  • Drop blank or draft pages.
  • Re-save image-only pages as JPEG-compressed PDFs.

Related extensions

References