PDF Compressor

What Nonkera's PDF compressor does

Nonkera shrinks a PDF by re-rendering each page as a single optimized image at the resolution and quality level you choose, then rebuilding the file from those images. That's a different technique than editing the fonts or metadata inside the original file, and it's chosen deliberately: it works reliably on any PDF regardless of how it was created, and it's especially effective on the documents people most often need to shrink — scans and image-heavy files, where the bulk of the size comes from pictures in the first place.

Everything happens locally in your browser tab. A scanned contract or financial statement never has to leave your device to get smaller.

The trade-off: pages become images

Because each page is rasterized, the compressed PDF's text is no longer selectable, searchable, or copyable — visually it looks the same, but under the hood every page is a picture of itself rather than a page with live text on it. For scanned documents this changes nothing, since a scan was already just a photograph of a page. For a PDF exported from a word processor with real, selectable text, compressing it trades that selectable text away in exchange for a smaller file — worth knowing before you compress something you'll need to search or copy from later. If you need to keep selectable text, hold onto the original file alongside the compressed copy.

Why file size matters

A large PDF can bounce off email attachment limits (commonly 25MB or less), take noticeably longer to upload to a job application portal or government form, and eat into mobile data when someone downloads it on the go. Image-heavy PDFs — scanned documents in particular, where each page is essentially a photograph — are often the worst offenders, sometimes running tens of megabytes for a document that's only a few pages of text and a handful of images.

Who actually needs a smaller PDF

People compress PDFs to get a scanned document under an email attachment size limit, to speed up uploading application materials to job portals with strict file size caps, and to make a large report or portfolio easier to send over a slow connection. Businesses compress PDFs before archiving large volumes of scanned documents to save on storage, and anyone sharing a PDF over messaging apps benefits from a smaller file that sends and downloads faster.

Choosing a compression level

"High quality" renders pages at 200 DPI with light JPEG compression — a safe default for anything you'll want to zoom into later, like a contract with small print. "Balanced" drops to 150 DPI, which is plenty sharp for on-screen reading and typical printing, and is the right choice for most everyday documents. "Smallest file" renders at 100 DPI with more aggressive compression, trading visible sharpness for the smallest possible download — best for documents you're archiving or sending somewhere with a strict size cap, rather than ones you'll print or zoom into.

A text-only PDF exported from a word processor is often already small, and rasterizing its pages can produce a file that's a similar size or even larger than the original — the tool will tell you if that happens. The real savings show up on scanned and image-heavy PDFs, which is exactly the case this compressor is built around.