How-to guide
A tender pack or drawing issue is too big to email, and most online compressors turn every page into a picture - so the line work and small text go soft. Metre2 Compress PDF only makes the photos, scans and hidden bulk smaller; lines, text and dimensions stay as they are. It's free in your browser and nothing is uploaded.
Open Compress PDF and choose Choose PDFs, or drop the files onto the page. Each file is checked as it comes in: here a 38.9 MB tender pack (a letter, GA drawings, site photos and two scans) and 16.3 MB of scanned delivery notes - 55.2 MB in all, well over the 20 MB a typical Outlook mailbox accepts. Your originals are never changed.
The Check tab breaks each file down into images, fonts, drawing content and extras, and lists the heaviest pages. In this tender pack 93% of the size is images - photos, scans and images stored at far more detail than the page shows, some of them repeated on several sheets - while the actual line work and text is only 65 KB. What will help tells you what compressing will do about it.
Back on Compress, choose a preset. Balanced is the default and the best all-rounder: photos at 150 dpi, scans at 200 dpi and black-and-white scans at 300 dpi. Best quality keeps photos and scans close to print quality (225-300 dpi); Smaller makes the smallest files, a little soft if printed. Then press Compress.
Each file shows its saving: the tender pack went from 38.9 MB to 1.6 MB and the delivery notes from 16.3 MB to 4.4 MB - 6.0 MB together, small enough for one email. The compressed copies download to your computer, as a zip when there's more than one, with _compressed on the end of the name.
Open the Compare tab, pick the file and page, and you see the original and the compressed page together, split by a slider.
Zoom in on the smallest text you care about - a title block, dimensions, a note - and drag the slider across it. The drawing text and lines are the same on both sides, because they were never turned into a picture; only images such as the logo panel are re-saved at a sensible resolution.
Yes. The Smaller, Balanced and Best quality presets, drawing-safe compression, removing hidden extras, the Check and the before-and-after Compare are free, three files at a time, in your browser and in the Windows app. Compress PDF Pro is an optional one-off £12.99 upgrade in the Windows app for size limits and splitting for email, whole folders, clean for sending, custom settings and presets, and savings reports.
No. Pages are never turned into pictures, so lines, text and dimensions stay sharp at any zoom and stay searchable. Only the photos, scans and hidden extras inside the file are made smaller - and you can check any page in Compare before you send it.
Not in the free version - you pick a preset and see the result. Compress PDF Pro, in the Windows app, can aim for under 10 MB, Outlook's 20 MB, Gmail's 25 MB or your own limit, and split anything that still won't fit into numbered parts between pages.
No. In the browser version everything happens inside your browser tab, and the Windows app works on your PC. Your originals are never changed - the compressed copies are new files.
Not yet. A PDF encrypted by its author is listed as protected and left alone - save an unprotected copy from the program that made it first.
