NiftyWebTools
Start free
Nifty Tools
Two modes. Preserve keeps selectable text, links, and form fields intact. Aggressive rasterises pages for maximum size reduction on scans.
Processing mode: Local Browser-local
Free tier: up to 10 files, 100 MB each. Day Pass raises this to 50 files, 500 MB each.
Mode: Preserve — selectable text, links, and form fields will be kept.
Keep working
How to use it
Good for
Use Preserve for everyday PDFs — invoices, reports, contracts, and e-books — where selectable text, links, and form fields need to survive. Use Aggressive for scans, photo PDFs, and image-heavy attachments where smaller output matters more than text fidelity. Preserve mode re-encodes embedded images at a lower quality tier using pdf-lib (the open-source PDF manipulation library), typically reducing image-heavy PDFs by 40–70 % while keeping text, links, and form fields byte-for-byte intact. Aggressive mode rasterises every page to a JPEG at configurable quality, which can reduce a 10 MB scan-heavy PDF to under 2 MB — an 80 %+ reduction — at the cost of selectable text. Both modes run entirely in the browser via the Web Crypto and Canvas APIs supported by Chrome 90+, Firefox 88+, Safari 15+, and Edge 90+; no file ever leaves the device.
Processing mode
Files are processed by your browser. They never reach our servers.
Questions
Yes, in Preserve mode — selectable text, links, bookmarks, and form fields stay intact. Preserve works by re-encoding embedded images inside the PDF structure using pdf-lib without touching the text or vector layers. Aggressive mode rasterises every page to a JPEG, which removes selectable text, links, bookmarks, and form fields. The Aggressive radio shows an inline warning before you commit to it.
Text-heavy PDFs are usually already well compressed by their authoring tool (Word, LaTeX, InDesign, and Chrome's Save as PDF all apply Flate or DCT compression on export), so Preserve mode's image re-encoding may have nothing to optimise. The result panel will tell you when this happens. Switching to Aggressive will shrink the file further by re-rendering pages as images, but you lose selectable text — only worth it for scans and photo PDFs. As a benchmark: a 12-page Word-exported PDF at 1.4 MB typically stays within 5 % of its original size in Preserve mode because its images are already compressed, while a 10-page scanned PDF at 15 MB routinely drops to 2–3 MB in Aggressive mode at the default quality.
Yes. This tool supports multiple PDFs in one run.
You're limited only by what your browser can hold in memory. Most laptops handle PDFs up to a few hundred MB without issue; very large scans may need to be split first using the Split PDF tool.
No. Compression runs entirely in your browser using pdf-lib. Your file never leaves your device — you can verify this by opening your browser's Network tab in DevTools before compressing; no requests fire after the initial page load. The tool works on flaky connections and keeps confidential documents private.
Yes. The core workflow stays free. Optional Day and Project Passes add more file and batch headroom on supported file-pipeline tools when you hit the free limits.
Merge PDF Files