Compress Scanned PDF — Dramatically Reduce Scan Size

Scanned documents create massive PDFs. Our compressor specializes in reducing scanned page sizes by 50-80%.

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Compress PDF

Reduce file size while maintaining quality. Choose compression level.

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How to compress scanned PDF

1

Upload Your Scanned PDF

Select the scanned PDF document. These are typically 2-10x larger than digital PDFs.

2

Compress Scan Images

Our tool specifically targets the image data in scanned pages, reducing resolution to a readable but much smaller size.

3

Download Optimized Scan

Get your compressed scanned PDF. Text should remain fully readable at normal zoom levels.

Why compress scanned PDF?

Scanned PDFs are notorious for being enormous. When a scanner captures each page as a 300 DPI image, even a 10-page document can balloon to 50MB+. This makes them nearly impossible to email, slow to upload, and wasteful to store. AskPDF's compression is especially effective on scanned documents because there's so much redundant image data to optimize. Expect 50-80% size reduction while keeping the scans perfectly readable.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why are scanned PDFs so large?
Scanners capture each page as a high-resolution image (often 300 DPI). A single scanned page can be 5-10MB because it's essentially a photograph of paper.
Will I still be able to read the text?
Yes. We reduce image resolution to a level that's still sharp for on-screen reading and standard printing. Only zooming in to extreme levels would show any difference.
Can I still OCR the compressed scan?
Yes. The compressed scan retains enough image quality for OCR tools to extract text accurately.

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