PDF Shrink 4.5

PDF Shrink allows you to reduce the size of your PDF documents. The application does this by compressing your documents with the JPEG2000 standard and by reducing the quality of any images or charts that are inside your document. It can effectively reduce the size of your PDF files to 50% of the original size, although the developers claim that you can do better than that.

The main window shows the four default compression presets: e-mail, iPhone, Print and Web. Each one of those has a description that tells you what they do. For example, the iPhone preset optimizes PDF files for viewing on iPhones and other mobile devices. If you want, you can create your own, custom-made presets by following a wizard.

If you use it well, PDF Shrink can really reduce the size of your files, without ruining it. You can probably compress a PDF file without losing quality at all, if you are careful enough.

In my testing, I compressed a 22-megabyte file into a 10-megabyte file. Although I could notice some pixelation in some images, the rest of the document looked great.

PDF Shrink offers a demo that has full functionality. You can use it for 10 days.