PDF Page Counter & Inspector

This tool inspects a PDF rather than re-compressing it: it reports the page count and paper sizes, the document properties, whether it is encrypted, and how much of the file is images and embedded fonts, so you can see what you are dealing with before deciding how to shrink it. It does not re-encode the images inside the file, because doing that properly needs image codecs that pdf-lib does not provide. What follows is the approach that actually works, using the tools available here.

1. 1Upload the PDF to see its page count, size, and metadata.
2. 2Read the note under “What makes it this size”: it tells you whether scanned pages, images or embedded fonts carry the weight.
3. 3Remove what you do not need. Use the Split PDF tool to extract only the pages you actually have to submit — this is usually the single biggest reduction available.
4. 4If the file is a scan and still too large, rescan the original at 150–200 DPI rather than 600. Reducing the source resolution beats any post-processing.
5. 5For a document you generated yourself, re-export it from the original application with image quality set lower.

The PDF Page Counter & Inspector runs entirely in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded, stored, or logged.

• Page count against file size is the fastest diagnostic: more than about 1MB per page means the pages are images, not text.
• Text-based PDFs exported from Word are already compact. If yours is large and text-only, the cause is usually embedded fonts or an oversized logo.
• Rescanning at a lower DPI is more effective than any amount of post-processing, and it does not stack compression artefacts.
• Splitting out the pages you need is lossless, unlike image re-compression.