Compress a PDF to 1 MB
The target is already set to 1 MB. Your browser re-encodes the pictures inside the document, dropping quality a step at a time until the file fits, and tells you if it cannot get there.
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Nothing here is uploaded. See how the page enforces it.
Who needs 1 MB
The general-purpose ceiling. Forums, wikis, chat platforms and content management systems cluster here, as do a lot of older web applications written when a megabyte was a lot of room.
Whether 1 MB is reachable at all
Loose for anything short of a long colour scan. A photo-heavy report reaches it easily and the quality cost is usually invisible.
This matters more than the number, because a PDF is only compressible where it holds pictures. A scanner writes one large JPEG per sheet and the text around it costs almost nothing by comparison, so a scan has a great deal to give up. A document exported from a word processor is text, fonts and vector drawing, none of which an image compressor can touch. If yours is the second kind, the row will say there were no pictures to shrink, and that is the honest end of it rather than a failure to work around.
How the target is approached
Re-encoding a whole document is far too expensive to binary-search the way the image tools do, so this walks down a short ladder of quality and resolution steps and stops at the first one that fits under 1 MB. Because the ladder descends, the first fit is also the best looking result available at that size.
Every attempt happens on your own machine, and the document is reloaded from your file each time, so a failed attempt never leaves a mark on the next one. Nothing is uploaded at any point, which is worth knowing when the document is a payslip or a medical letter.
Questions
+ Is the result exactly 1 MB?
It is at or under 1,048,576 bytes. Landing on the number exactly would mean padding the file, which is not something an upload form wants and not something this does.
+ Is a compressed PDF still searchable?
Yes. Only the image streams are rewritten, so the text layer, the page count and the document structure are untouched. If your PDF is a scan with no text layer, it never had one, and this does not add one.
+ Does it change the text or the page count?
No. Only image streams are rewritten. Text stays selectable and searchable, the page count is unchanged, and no page is flattened into a picture.
+ Are my files uploaded anywhere?
No. The PDF is read and rewritten by your own browser. Open devtools, watch the Network tab while you run it, and nothing leaves. The page keeps working with your connection switched off, which is the part worth caring about when the document is a payslip, a contract or a medical letter.
+ Is there a size limit or a sign-up?
Neither. There is no server paying for your bandwidth, so there is nothing to meter. The practical ceiling is your own device's memory, which on a normal laptop means documents of several hundred megabytes.