How to Compress a PDF to a Specific Size on Windows

A PDF is usually large because of the images inside it: scanned pages, photos and screenshots. Text, fonts and vector drawings take up very little space in comparison.

A scanner that saves every page at high resolution, or a report built from full-size phone photos, can easily reach tens of megabytes. Shrinking it means storing those images at a lower resolution or with stronger JPEG compression, ideally only as much as your limit requires.

Not really. Microsoft Edge, the default PDF reader on Windows 11, can show, mark up and print a PDF, but it has no option to make one smaller, and neither does File Explorer.

The usual workaround is printing the PDF to Microsoft Print to PDF. That virtual printer has no quality or compression settings: it rebuilds the document from the print output, so a scan rarely gets smaller and can come out larger, and the copy loses its links, bookmarks and form fields. Here's why.

Office can save smaller PDFs with Minimum size (publishing online), but only from documents you made in Word, Excel or PowerPoint, and Office isn't part of Windows. Zipping doesn't help either: the images in a PDF are already compressed, so the ZIP is barely smaller.

In File Acture, set Compress by to Target size, type the limit, and the app searches for the highest image quality that still fits. The search tries image resolutions from 300 down to 72 DPI and a range of JPEG qualities, measures the real file size and corrects itself, so the result lands at or just below your target.

Only the images change. Text, fonts and vector graphics are never touched, and the links, bookmarks and form fields that a printed copy loses stay as they were.

The Presets menu offers 1, 2, 5, 10 and 25 MB, and you can type any value in KB or MB. File Acture uses decimal units (1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes), so a file under 2 MB also passes a site that counts a megabyte as 1,024 KB; File Explorer counts that way too, so it shows a slightly smaller number. If the PDF already fits, it's only tidied up, not re-encoded. If it can't get as small as you asked, File Acture tells you the smallest size it can reach instead of saving a ruined file.

Often, yes: a few scanned pages or a short photo report usually fit in 1 MB at a readable quality. A long, photo-heavy document may only get there at low resolution, and File Acture says so when it can't.

• Try grayscale. Convert images to grayscale helps with colored scans of documents that don't need color.
• Split it. If the portal accepts several files, split the PDF into parts and give each part its own target.
• Drop the metadata. Remove document metadata clears the title, author and similar fields. It saves little space, but it keeps personal details out of the file.

Compression works on images, so a PDF made mostly of text, fonts or vector art shrinks very little.

• Scans that were already saved at low quality have little left to give.
• Black-and-white scans stored as JBIG2 or CCITT, and CMYK, JPEG 2000, indexed or 16-bit images, are left as they are.
• A PDF that needs a password to open has to be unlocked first with Unlock PDF; protect the smaller copy again afterwards.

Online compressors upload your PDF, which is a real risk for contracts, payslips and ID scans. File Acture compresses on your PC and never uploads the file. The free version needs a connection only to count its runs, and Pro works without one, going online now and then to renew its license.

The free version includes 3 runs on each PC, with up to 5 PDFs per run, and Pro removes the limits; see pricing. For single photos, Compress Images does the same job with a target in KB.

If the file is going into an email, see what actually fits in a mailbox; if it is for an upload form, see portal size limits.