Compress a PDF without losing quality
You tried to email a PDF or upload it to a government portal, but it was rejected because the file size was too large. Many compression tools reduce the size by drastically lowering the resolution, leaving you with blurry, unreadable pages.
Where the size actually goes
In nearly every oversized PDF, the images are the file. Text is tiny by comparison - a page of prose costs a few kilobytes, while one photograph of that page can cost several megabytes. So compression is mostly a question of what to do with the images, and that is where tools differ.
What Editrix does
- Re-encodes embedded images at a chosen JPEG quality, rather than flattening the whole page to a picture.
- Caps the longest side in pixels. An image far larger than it is ever displayed at is pure waste; the cap scales with the quality you pick.
- Deflates the content streams on every save, at every setting.
The part that protects legibility is how the downscaling is done. Shrinking an image by simply throwing away pixels - point sampling - is what produces the speckled, broken text you see from careless compressors: it keeps some strokes and drops others at random. Editrix averages each block of source pixels into the output pixel instead, so a thin letter stroke fades rather than vanishing. It is the difference between text that looks softer and text that looks damaged.
Choose by result, not by guesswork
Editrix offers three presets and a quality slider, but the useful part is that it measures your document before you commit. The estimated output size for each setting is computed from the images in your actual file, not from a generic ratio - so you can pick the lightest setting that still clears the limit you are up against, instead of compressing repeatedly to find out.
- Open the Compress tool and pick your PDF.
- Compare the estimated sizes shown for each level.
- Choose a preset, or use the slider for a specific target.
- Save. Everything happens on your device - no upload.
When compression will not help much
A PDF that is already mostly text will barely shrink, because there was little to remove. A file of scanned pages will shrink enormously, because it is entirely images. And compression is not reversible: quality removed is gone, so keep the original if the document matters.