Compress PDF to 1 MB

Need to compress a PDF to 1MB or under for a portal upload limit or email attachment? This tool targets 1 MB entirely in your browser.

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Compress PDF to 1 MB now

One megabyte, and what it costs

A 1 MB cap is typical of application forms that expect a multi-page attachment: a transcript, a set of certificates, a scanned booklet.

At this size you can usually keep the text layer intact, which is the outcome to aim for. A searchable PDF is more useful to whoever receives it, and it avoids the situation where a rasterized document cannot be verified because none of its text can be copied.

If a 1 MB target still forces Scan mode, the file is probably carrying photographs at full camera resolution. Reducing those before assembling the PDF is a cleaner fix than compressing the finished document.

Scan mode or Keep text?

This is the only decision that really changes the result, and it depends on what your PDF already contains.

• Keep text leaves the text layer alone and compresses the images around it. The document stays selectable, searchable and copyable. The reduction is smaller, which is fine whenever the target has headroom.
• Scan mode rasterizes each page into an image and compresses that. It reaches much smaller files, and it is the right choice for documents that were scanned or photographed in the first place — they have no text layer to preserve.

The trap is using Scan mode on a document that was born digital. You get a smaller file and lose the ability to search it, select a reference number from it, or have a screen reader read it aloud. Try Keep text first and only fall back to Scan mode if the target demands it.

Other targets: 100 KB · 200 KB · 500 KB · 2 MB · 5 MB · PDF for email

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