Compress a PDF to under 10MB
For larger scanned documents and multi-page reports that need trimming, not crushing.
How to compress a PDF to under 10MB
A 10MB target usually isn't about squeezing a document as hard as possible — it's about handling files that are large mainly because they have a lot of pages: multi-page scanned reports, bound documents scanned page-by-page at high resolution, or PDFs that bundle several supporting documents together. At this size, the goal is trimming enough excess to clear the limit without visibly degrading quality, not maximum compression.
Because 10MB is a relatively generous ceiling, you can usually keep the quality slider fairly high — 70-85% — and still see a meaningful size reduction, especially if the original was scanned at a high DPI that's overkill for on-screen viewing. If you have a genuinely huge document (100+ pages), it's worth compressing in stages: run it through once, check the resulting size, and lower the quality setting only as much as needed rather than defaulting straight to the lowest setting.