Compress PDF for Email

Most PDF compressors give you vague levels like ‘low’ or ‘high’ and leave you to guess whether the result will pass a portal’s size check. Fileopia lets you type the limit itself – 100 KB, 250 KB, 1 MB – and does the trial and error for you, entirely in your browser.

Common uses

• Meet upload limits on job, exam, visa and admission portals.
• Fit attachments under email and helpdesk limits.
• Shrink scanned documents from phone scanner apps.
• Prepare court, tax and insurance e-filing documents.

Tips for best results

• Remove blank or unnecessary pages first with Delete pages.
• Scan in grayscale – it is much smaller than colour.
• Aim 5–10% below the limit to allow for how a portal counts bytes.
• If you must keep text selectable, set a slightly larger target.

The three stages

Stage one rebuilds the file losslessly and removes junk. Stage two decodes every photo or scan inside the PDF and re-encodes it as JPEG, stepping from 2000 px at high quality down to about 400 px, checking the size each time. Stage three renders every page as an image and searches combinations of resolution (from about 144 dpi down to about 30 dpi) and JPEG quality, keeping the largest result that fits, so you get the best quality the limit allows.

Why some PDFs barely shrink

A PDF made purely of text and vector graphics is already compact; most of its size is fonts. Such files rarely need compressing, and rasterizing them can even make them bigger. Scans and photo-heavy files, on the other hand, can usually shrink by 80–95%.