How to Compress a PDF So It Fits in an Email
Most email services limit attachments — Gmail, for example, caps them at 25 MB. If your PDF is over the limit, here is what to do.
Compress the PDF
- Open the Compress PDF tool and upload your file.
- Choose a level: Light, Balanced or Maximum. Balanced is a good starting point.
- Download the smaller file and check the size.
What compression can and can't do
This tool shrinks a PDF by cleaning up its internal structure — removing unused objects and compressing data — without re-rendering the pages, so the layout doesn't change. That works well for PDFs exported from Word or other software.
PDFs that are mostly photographs or scanned pages are different: the images are already compressed, so they may only shrink a little. If the tool reports that the file is already fully compressed, no further reduction is possible with this method.
If the PDF is still too large
Split the PDF into two or more smaller files and send them separately, or extract just the pages the recipient needs. For scans, re-scanning at a lower resolution usually makes the biggest difference.