Compress a PDF to 500 KB

Half a megabyte is the limit that lets a real document through: several scanned pages, still legible. Set it here and the file is worked down to it without leaving this browser.

• Roomy enough that a multi-page scan usually survives it intact.
• The file is read and rewritten by your browser. Nothing is uploaded.
• You see the result, and page one, before you save it.

A limit that a document can live with

Five hundred kilobytes is where visa applications, tender portals and university submissions tend to sit, and it is the first limit that is kind to a multi-page document. A ten-page scan can reach it with its text intact, which is not true at a hundred.

It is still a real constraint for anything photographed rather than scanned. A phone camera produces several megabytes a page, and colour makes it worse, so a file that looks modest on screen can be an order of magnitude over the line.

Getting there without ruining the document

The tool moves resolution and image quality together and keeps the largest result that still fits, because at this size there is usually room to spare and no reason to spend it. A file that comes out at 480 KB is a better answer than one that comes out at sixty, even though both satisfy the portal.

Where a document has a stamp, a seal or a signature, that is the part worth checking, and it is the part the preview is for. Page one is drawn on screen at the quality that was chosen, before anything is written to disk.

If your document is already under the limit, nothing is redrawn at all. The tool reports that it was already small enough and hands the original back, since a needless pass only costs you sharpness.

What the result actually is

Compression here works by drawing each page again as a picture, so the saved file is an image of the document rather than text. It prints identically and it satisfies any size check. What it will not do afterwards is let you select a sentence or search for a word, and a portal that demands a searchable PDF wants the original or an OCR pass instead.

Will a 500 KB result still be readable?

Usually yes, and you do not have to take it on trust: page one is drawn on screen at the chosen quality before you save, so you can see the small print for yourself.

Can I pick a size that is not on the list?

Yes. The custom field takes any number in kilobytes or megabytes, and the tool aims at that instead.

Does this work on a phone?

Yes. It runs in the browser on a phone as it does on a laptop, though a large scan takes longer on slower hardware.

Support and billing: support@gosmartpdf.com. Operated by Mrityunjay Kumar, India. Payments by Dodo Payments, our merchant of record.

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