Honest answer: you can cut 30–50% with no visible change, and 80–90% with a real but controlled quality trade. Lossless passes only remove structural bloat; image-heavy PDFs need resampling to shrink dramatically.
In practice: (1) Text-only PDFs: lossless rewrite is safe (often 20–40% smaller). (2) Scanned PDFs: pick Recommended for near-invisible changes. (3) Compare before/after visually if the document goes to a client.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a truly lossless PDF compressor?
Yes, for files whose bulk is structural redundancy. For scanned documents, no — the pixels are the data.
Which setting keeps text searchable?
All of them. Text layers are preserved; only images are resampled.
Do it in the full tool
Open Compress PDF for all options, or jump straight to another step below.