Little Toolworks

Compress a PDF to 2 MB

Two megabytes is the usual ceiling on government, university and job portals. The images inside the PDF are re-encoded and the file is repacked — text stays selectable and nothing is uploaded.

Drop a PDF here, or click to choose

PDF up to 50 MB on Free · one at a time · nothing leaves your device

Free plan

How it works

  1. Your browser reads the PDF from your disk. No network request carries the document.
  2. Text, fonts and vector drawings are left untouched. The page is never rendered to an image, so text stays selectable, searchable and readable by screen readers.
  3. Embedded images are scaled down and re-encoded as JPEG, but only when the new image is smaller than the original. Then the file is repacked with compressed object streams.
  4. If 2 MB is out of reach, it says so. It reports the smallest honest size instead of turning pages into pictures and calling that compression.

Scans shrink; text does not

Photo-heavy and scanned PDFs shrink a lot. In testing on this site, a two-page 300 dpi scan went from 3.1 MB to 0.8 MB, and an eight-page photo document from 3.5 MB to 1.7 MB, with the pages still sharp.

A PDF that is mostly text has almost nothing to remove. One 142-page government publication was 98% text, fonts and page structure; re-encoding its single image saved 14 KB. Reaching 2 MB would mean replacing every page with a picture — the text would stop being selectable, and in testing the file grew from 3.1 MB to 64 MB. This tool will not do that.

If a text-heavy PDF is too large, fix it at the source. Export it with smaller images, subset the fonts, or split it into two documents. Squeezing it here will not work, and the tool tells you rather than damaging the file.

2 MB here means 2,000,000 bytes. That is stricter than the binary reading, so the result also fits a portal that counts 2 × 1,024 KB.

Pricing

Free

$0

  • Targets of 10 MB, 5 MB and 2 MB
  • PDFs up to 50 MB
  • One file at a time
  • No upload, no account, no watermark

Pro

$5/month

  • Adds the 1 MB and 500 KB targets
  • PDFs up to 200 MB
  • Batch: compress up to 10 PDFs at once
  • One subscription unlocks Pro in every Little Toolworks tool

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Questions

Will the text stay selectable?

Yes. The tool never rasterises pages. Text, fonts and vector drawings are copied as they are; only embedded images may be re-encoded.

Why did my PDF barely shrink?

It is mostly text, fonts and structure rather than images. There is little to remove without turning pages into pictures, which this tool refuses to do.

What kind of PDF shrinks best?

Scans and photo-heavy documents. Their embedded images have the most redundant data, so scaling and re-encoding them saves the most.

Can I reach 1 MB or 500 KB?

Those are Pro targets. The free page offers 10 MB, 5 MB and 2 MB; Pro adds 1 MB and 500 KB, plus a 200 MB input cap and batch compression.

Is the PDF uploaded?

No. The file is parsed and repacked in this tab.

What if 2 MB is impossible?

The tool reports the smallest result it could produce instead of pretending. You can then decide whether to split the file or re-export it.