The form only takes 2 MB, email refuses anything over 25, and your PDF is 14. The good news: there is almost always plenty to throw away — and what weighs is not what people think.
Not the text. A hundred pages of nothing but text come to about 200 KB — less than one photo. What weighs are the images: a scan, a pasted photograph, a high-resolution logo repeated on every page.
That is why a six-page scanned contract runs to 14 MB while the same six pages typed on a computer run to 150 KB. Six photographs against six pages of letters.
The images are almost always at a resolution far beyond what is needed. A scanner stores at 300 or 600 dots per inch because that makes sense for archiving; for reading on screen or printing at home, 150 is plenty. That alone cuts the file to a fifth.
Hidden data takes up room too, and nobody notices it: stored thumbnails of every page, older versions of the document left inside, embedded fonts no longer used.
Do not turn the PDF into images to shrink it. It is the most common advice on the internet and the worst of all: the text stops being text, nobody can search or copy it, and anyone using a screen reader can no longer hear it.
And do not compress further than you need. If the limit is 2 MB, there is no point reaching 500 KB — every extra pass takes away quality that does not come back.
That is what this tool does, and it takes under a minute.
Compress my PDF