How to reduce a PDF's file size without losing text
Overtype's reduce file size tool compresses a PDF in your browser so it fits an upload or email limit. The text stays as text, so the document is still searchable and editable afterwards.
Attachment limits are the usual reason to compress a PDF: 25 MB for most email, often far less for a submission portal. Scanned documents and image-heavy reports blow past those limits easily.
The important thing is what compression costs you. Some tools flatten the whole document into images, which shrinks the file but destroys the text layer — the result cannot be searched, selected or edited afterwards.
Step by step in Overtype
1. Open the file
Open the oversized PDF in Overtype and check the current size.
2. Remove what you do not need
Delete pages you will not send, and crop away wide margins or scanner borders. Fewer, smaller pages compress better than a big file squeezed harder.
3. Reduce file size
Run reduce file size. Overtype compresses the document in your browser before you send it.
4. Consider recolouring
If the document is a scan that does not need colour, grayscale or black & white can cut the size further and often makes text crisper.
5. Check and export
Look over a page or two to confirm the pages are still legible, then save the compressed PDF to your computer.
Why this works on your device
Compression is a local operation: the extension rewrites the document inside your browser and hands the smaller file to Chrome's download. There is no upload step, which is both faster on a big file and safer, since an oversized PDF is often a scanned bundle of exactly the material you would not want on someone else's server.
Questions
- Will the text still be searchable?
- Yes. Compression does not convert your pages into flat images, so real text remains real text.
- Why is my scanned PDF so large?
- Each page is a photograph. Recolouring to grayscale or black & white and cropping the borders usually helps considerably.
- Can I split the file instead?
- Yes. Splitting into separate files is often the better answer when a portal has a hard per-file limit.