Compress PDF

Shrink your PDF files without destroying them. BentoPDF offers two distinct compression algorithms -- one for text-heavy documents, another for photo-heavy scans -- so you get meaningful size reduction regardless of what your PDF contains.

How It Works

1. Upload one or more PDFs by clicking the drop zone or dragging files in.
2. Select a Compression Algorithm -- Condense or Photon.
3. Pick a Compression Level from Light to Extreme.
4. Optionally toggle Convert to Grayscale or expand Custom Settings for fine-grained control.
5. Click Compress PDF. For multiple files, you get a single ZIP download.

Compression Algorithms

Condense (Recommended)

The default algorithm. It removes dead weight from the PDF structure, recompresses images at a target DPI, subsets fonts to strip unused glyphs, and removes embedded thumbnails. The PDF stays fully functional -- text remains selectable, links keep working.

Condense requires the PyMuPDF WASM engine.

Photon (For Photo-Heavy PDFs)

Photon renders each page to a JPEG image and reassembles them into a new PDF. This works well for scanned documents or image-heavy files where Condense cannot squeeze much out. The trade-off is that text becomes non-selectable and hyperlinks stop working.

Compression Levels

Level	Image Quality	DPI Target	Best For
Light	90%	150	Preserving visual quality
Balanced	75%	96	Everyday documents
Aggressive	50%	72	Email attachments, web uploads
Extreme	30%	60	Maximum size reduction

Custom Settings

Expand the Custom Settings panel to override preset values:

• Output Quality (1-100%) -- JPEG quality for recompressed images
• Resize Images To (DPI) -- target resolution for downsampled images
• Only Process Above (DPI) -- images below this threshold are left untouched
• Remove metadata -- strips document info fields
• Subset fonts -- removes unused glyphs from embedded fonts
• Remove embedded thumbnails -- drops preview images stored inside the PDF

Use Cases

• Bringing a 50 MB report under an email attachment limit
• Optimizing marketing PDFs for faster website downloads
• Archiving large document sets where storage costs matter
• Preparing scanned contracts for a document management system
• Reducing mobile data usage when sharing PDFs over messaging apps

Tips

• Start with Balanced. If the result is still too large, step up to Aggressive before trying Extreme.
• Use Photon only when Condense produces minimal savings -- it permanently removes text selection.
• The grayscale toggle alone can cut file size substantially for color-heavy documents.

Related Tools

• Linearize PDF -- optimize the compressed PDF for fast web viewing
• Rasterize PDF -- convert pages to images at a specific DPI
• Repair PDF -- fix a PDF that broke during compression elsewhere
• Remove Metadata -- strip hidden data for privacy