How-to guides

Compress a PDF

How to make a PDF smaller with vivePDF, see what takes up the space, choose a compression profile and get a file small enough to e-mail.

To make a PDF smaller, open Tools › Compress, choose your file, pick a profile and click Compress. Pictures are resampled and unused font parts and leftover structure are cleaned out; the original file stays as it was.

  1. Open Tools › Compress and choose the PDF, or drag it onto the window.
  2. Look at What the file is made of: pictures, fonts and page content are shown separately, with the largest pictures listed.
  3. Pick a Profile. For e-mail, Strong is usually enough.
  4. Click Compress.
The Compress tool: a bar showing that pictures fill most of a 25 MB brochure, and a list of the largest pictures

The profiles differ like this:

  • Light: leaves pictures alone and only cleans the structure and fonts.
  • Balanced: 150 dpi and 75% JPEG; invisible on screen.
  • Strong: 100 dpi and 60% JPEG; ideal for e-mail.
  • Extreme: 72 dpi and 40% JPEG; the smallest file, at low quality.
  • Custom: you set the resolution and quality yourself.

The result panel shows the percentage saved, the old and new size and a before-and-after preview. In the example below, a 25 MB brochure came down to 266 KB.

Compression result: −99%, from 25.0 MB to 265.8 KB, with a before and after preview

Need to get under a set size?

Turn on Compress to a target size and enter the limit (for example 10 MB). vivePDF tries the profiles from light to strong and saves the first result that fits.

A text-heavy PDF that is already small gains little; the big savings come from large photos and scans. For scanned documents, also see Make scanned pages searchable (OCR).