Compress a PDF
Shrink a PDF by stripping metadata and rewriting it — honestly, within limits.
Your files never leave your device. Everything here runs inside your browser tab. Nothing is uploaded to Fledgr or anywhere else — there is no server to upload to. Turn off your Wi-Fi after the page loads and it still works.
What this can and cannot do. Because nothing is uploaded, this runs on what a browser can do unaided: it strips metadata and rewrites the file structure into compressed object streams. On text-heavy or badly-written PDFs that can take off a useful slice. On a PDF that is mostly scanned photographs — which is most student material — the images are already JPEG and the saving will be close to nothing. It cannot re-encode or down-sample those images the way Ghostscript on a server does, and it will tell you plainly when it saved nothing rather than pretend otherwise.
Pick one PDF — or drag it here.
What this compressor actually does
Two things, both structural. It strips the metadata — title, author, creator application and the XMP packet, which is often tens of kilobytes of XML nobody reads. Then it rewrites the whole document using compressed object streams, which pack the thousands of small internal objects a PDF is made of into a few deflate-compressed blocks.
On PDFs exported by Word, generated by LaTeX, or produced by badly written software that never compressed its cross-reference tables, that can take off a real slice. You will see the before and after sizes and the exact percentage.
What it cannot do, honestly
It cannot re-encode or down-sample the images inside your PDF. That is the single thing that shrinks a scanned document, and it needs decoding every image, resampling it and re-encoding it as a lower quality JPEG — which is what Ghostscript does on a server, and what iLovePDF is really doing when it promises 70% off.
So if your file is a phone scan of forty handwritten pages, expect close to nothing. The tool will say so in plain words and tell you to keep your original rather than handing you a “compressed” file that is the same size. Doing that in the browser would mean downloading a rendering engine several megabytes larger than most of the PDFs it would be shrinking — a bad trade we have chosen not to make.
If you genuinely need a scan smaller, the fix is upstream: re-scan at 150 DPI instead of 600, or shoot in grayscale. It beats anything software can do afterwards.
When a student needs this
Upload limits. Exam portals cap attachments at 2 MB, scholarship forms at 1 MB, and email at 25 MB. Stripping metadata and rewriting the structure sometimes gets a borderline file under the line — and when it does not, knowing that in five seconds is more useful than trying six websites that all promise otherwise.
Stripping metadata is worth doing on its own, whatever the size. It is where your laptop's username, the name of your PDF printer, and sometimes an earlier document's title end up before you send work to a professor.
Your files never leave your device
Both steps run in your browser tab against bytes read from your own disk. Nothing is uploaded, which is also why the result is instant with no queue. That constraint is exactly why the savings are modest — and we would rather be straight about the trade than quietly upload your documents to make a better number.