Compress PDF to 100KB — Keeps the Text Selectable, Free

100 KB is the tightest limit most portals use for documents: certificates, ID proofs, caste or income certificates, application forms. The page is already set to 100 KB, so drop the PDF and the tool aims just under it.

Most PDFs that need to get to 100 KB are one or two pages, and for those this is often possible without touching how they look. A one-page government document saved from Word went from 292 KB to 75 KB just by trimming its fonts to the letters it uses, with every page checked against the original. When a document has photos, only the photos are recompressed. A three-page test document with photos fit in 100 KB with all its text selectable, where the usual page-as-image method left 71% of the words readable by OCR against our 99.7%. When the document is a scan, the scan itself is recompressed, in true grayscale if it is grey, which keeps more detail in the same 100 KB.

The honest limits. PDFs with a password or with security restrictions are left alone, because compressing them would save them without that protection. A digitally signed PDF can be compressed, but any change to the file makes the signature show as invalid; the tool warns you, and if the signature matters, upload the original. In fillable forms the fonts are kept whole, because whatever someone types later needs every letter. When the target is smaller than the text and fonts alone, the pages do become images. The result then says "pages as images", and the text, links, bookmarks and form fields are not kept; at very small sizes, check that small text is still readable. Pictures in print colours (CMYK) and black-and-white fax-style scans are not recompressed yet, so PDFs made of them reach small targets only as page images. Long documents take longer: a 141-page manual took between 10 and 45 seconds on a laptop. Everything runs in your browser, so the PDF is never uploaded.