BriskFile

Compress a PDF

Drop a PDF and BriskFile will tell you which kind of document it is before changing anything. Nothing is uploaded.

Nothing is uploaded. Your document is read by this page and processed by your own processor — which matters rather more for a contract than for a holiday photo.

To compress a PDF, first work out whether it is scanned images or real text: scans shrink by 80–95% when rasterised at a lower resolution, while text documents should only be restructured, because rasterising them destroys the text and often makes the file bigger.

There is no single way to compress a PDF

Every tool that offers you a "low / medium / high" slider is quietly picking one of two completely different operations, and picking wrong is destructive.

Restructure rewrites the file layout — shared object streams, no duplicated resources, metadata dropped. Nothing is redrawn, so text stays selectable and images keep their original quality. The saving is real but modest: often 5–25% on a bloated export, sometimes nothing at all on a file that was already written well.

Rasterise renders every page to an image and rebuilds the document from those. On a scanned document this routinely removes 80–95%, because scanners store enormous images at resolutions nobody needs. On a text document it is vandalism — the text stops being text, becomes unsearchable and unselectable, and the file frequently gets larger.

Which is why BriskFile measures first

Before offering you anything, BriskFile reads the text layer of your document and counts the characters. A page of ordinary prose holds several hundred; a scanned page holds almost none.

If your document turns out to be scans, rasterising is safe and BriskFile says so. If it is real text, BriskFile warns you plainly rather than letting you destroy a contract to save a megabyte.

The one rule that is never broken

If compression would produce a file larger than the one you started with, BriskFile returns your original untouched. A compressor that hands back something bigger has failed, whatever its settings claimed.

Other PDF tools

Questions

Why did my PDF barely get smaller?

Because it was probably already efficient. A text-only PDF is mostly font data and drawing instructions, and there is very little slack to remove. The large savings you see advertised come almost entirely from scanned documents, where the file is really a stack of oversized photographs.

Will my text still be selectable?

With restructuring, yes — nothing is redrawn. With rasterising, no: every page becomes a picture of itself. BriskFile tells you which of those applies to your document before you choose.

What resolution should I rasterise at?

150 DPI is comfortably readable on screen and is the right default for anything being emailed or archived. Use 200–300 if the document will be printed. Below 120 text starts to look soft.

Is my PDF uploaded anywhere?

No. The whole document is processed in your browser by your own processor. This matters more for PDFs than for anything else — contracts, bank statements, medical letters and scanned passports are exactly the documents that should never be handed to a stranger’s server to be reshuffled.

You can confirm it: open the Network tab before you start, or disconnect from the internet entirely. It still works.

What BriskFile will not do to you

  • Your files never leave your device

    Every conversion runs in your browser. Open DevTools, watch the Network tab, and you will see no upload — because there is not one.

  • No account, no email, no watermark

    Nothing to sign up for and nothing stamped on your images. There is no step between choosing a file and getting it back.

  • No limits at the download button

    No daily cap, no file counter, no "upgrade to download". If the tool starts a job, it finishes it.

  • Checkable, not just claimed

    Open the Network tab and convert something — nothing goes out. Or load the page, disconnect, and watch it keep working: the tool is already on your machine, and your file never leaves it.