Compress a PDF to under 2 MB
Trim a large PDF to fit a 2 MB upload cap with minimal visible loss — good for long reports and multi-page scans that must stay readable.
- Runs in your browser
- Files are never uploaded
- Free, no account
The target for long documents
2 MB is where a genuinely long document — a thesis chapter, a full set of bank statements, a surveyor's report, a scanned lease with schedules — can be brought inside an upload limit while staying readable. Below about 40 pages it is a comfortable budget; above that it starts to bite, and the tool tells you when it has.
The page-count arithmetic
The whole algorithm rests on one division, and it is worth being able to do it in your head before you start:
bytes per page ≈ (target − overhead) ÷ pages
overhead ≈ 1,200 + 260 × pages| Pages | Budget per page at 2 MB | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | ~209 KB | Excellent — near-original quality at 150–200 DPI |
| 40 | ~52 KB | Good. Clean text at around 110 DPI |
| 100 | ~21 KB | Acceptable for reading; small print will soften |
| 300 | ~7 KB | Heavily degraded — split the document instead |
The exact figures for your file, with your numbers substituted, appear under the result. Nothing is estimated behind your back.
Split first, compress second
When the arithmetic above says you are below about 20 KB a page, compressing harder is the wrong move. Two 100-page halves at 2 MB each give every page four times the budget of one 200-page file at 2 MB, and most portals that cap a single attachment are happy to take two.
- Split PDF — break a document into parts at chosen page numbers.
- Extract PDF pages — pull out only the range that was actually requested.
- Delete pages from PDF — remove blank scanner pages, separator sheets and duplicate cover pages before compressing.
Removing four blank pages from a 40-page scan is worth more than any quality setting: it is a 10 per cent budget increase for everything that remains.
How long it takes
Each page is rendered once and then re-encoded up to nine times. Rendering dominates, and it scales with page area at the chosen DPI rather than with the source file's size.
- A modern laptop: roughly 3 to 5 pages per second at 110 DPI.
- An older laptop or a phone: roughly 1 page per second.
- At 200 DPI: about three times slower, because there are three times as many pixels to draw and encode.
Progress is reported per page and the Cancel button takes effect immediately. Cancelling leaves the original file exactly as it was — it is never modified in place, because it is never written anywhere.
When 2 MB still is not enough
If the result panel says the target was missed, one of three things is true:
- The page count is past the floor. Every page needs a few hundred bytes of structure regardless of image data. At several hundred pages that alone approaches your target.
- The pages are enormous. An A0 poster or an engineering drawing has ten times the area of A4, so it needs ten times the pixels at the same DPI.
- You forced a high resolution. Set the resolution back to automatic and run it again.
Questions
What kind of document suits a 2 MB target?
Long ones. Twenty to sixty pages of scanned text fit comfortably at 2 MB while staying readable, which is where tighter targets start to fall apart.
Will a 300-page document work?
It will run, but each page gets only a few kilobytes at 2 MB and the result will be heavily degraded. Split the document first and compress the parts separately if the content matters.
How long does a large document take?
Roughly a third to half a second per page on a laptop, since every page is rendered once and then re-encoded up to nine times. Progress is shown per page and you can cancel at any point.
Can I stop it halfway?
Yes. Cancel leaves your original file completely untouched — it was never modified in place and never left the tab.