Compress PDFs

Make a PDF smaller by re-compressing its images. Text, vector graphics and the document structure are left alone.

POST https://api.pdfdispatch.com/v1/pdf/optimize

Form fields

Field	Type	Default	What it does
`files` required	file(s)	–	The PDFs to make smaller.
`imageQuality`	integer	`80`	JPEG quality for the re-compressed images, 1 to 100. Lower is smaller and blurrier.

On the conversion routes the same happens with optimizeImages=true (and, if you like, imageQuality).

Example

curl --fail-with-body \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $PDD_KEY" \
  --form files=@catalogue.pdf \
  --form imageQuality=70 \
  --output catalogue-small.pdf \
  https://api.pdfdispatch.com/v1/pdf/optimize

How much you save depends on the images. A catalogue full of photos often shrinks to a third; a text-only invoice hardly changes. Compare the result before you lower the quality further: below about 60, photos start to show blocks.