How to Compress a PDF File for Email.
Want to compress PDF files for emails to your friends or colleagues? Learn how to downsize PDF for email so you can share with ease
When emailing documents, email platforms limit attachment sizes to around 20 MB. While this is usually enough for small documents or text-based files, you’ll need to compress more comprehensive documents containing images, videos and other multimedia elements, before you send them out.
Send the files you want without any worry and follow our guide to learn how to compress large PDFs to a share-friendly size. You’ll even discover some bonus tips and tricks to compress large PDF files for email along the way.
What You’ll Learn.
What is File Compression?
File compression is a common practice in the computing world, often used to compress PDFs for email. It works in one of two ways:
- By ‘zipping’ it.
- With high-fidelity data compression, files can be reduced in size to significantly smaller sizes (up to 60% reduction) with minimal effect on quality.
We use the latter, taking our original large PDF file and reducing the file size using Adobe’s tools by up to 20 – 30% without any major impact on quality.
How to Compress PDF Files for Email in Adobe.
While our quick guide can get you started with ease, we know that in certain cases it's not that simple. That’s because PDF readers can differ depending on the platform. Here’s our guide to Adobe Acrobat tools on your specific operating system so that you can reduce the size of PDF for email on your personal computer.
How to Compress PDF Files for Email on Mac.
To make PDF smaller for email on a Mac, you’ve got two options:
Begin by opening the Safari browser and navigating to the online PDF compressor.
After doing this, select the Adobe PDF compression tool. Then select the file by browsing or dragging it onto the tool. When you do this, you’ll be asked to select the level of compression (high, medium, or low). Once this is selected, hit ‘Compress’ and download your PDF once the process has finished.
Alternatively, Mac users can use the pre-installed preview app. After opening this, browse through your files and selected the PDF you want to compress. From the context menu that will subsequently appear, choose File > Export (Don’t select the Export as PDF option).
From here, select the Quartz filter from the pop-up menu and choose the Reduce File Size option. Once this is complete, a file with a .zip extension will appear.
How to Compress PDFs for Email on Windows.
You can quickly access the Adobe online PDF compressor on your PC to compress PDFs. Here’s how to do it:
- Go to the Adobe online compression tool.
- Browse your PC using the select a file option, or just drag and drop your desired file.
- Once uploaded, Adobe’s tool offers you a variety of compression levels which you can choose from (High, medium or low – higher compression means smaller size, with slightly lower quality).
- Press the Compress button.
- Once finished, you can download your condensed PDF for email using the Download button.
- The website also allows you to continue working, merge or convert your PDF with Adobe Acrobat after you sign in.
Note: You can also use the Adobe Acrobat Pro application to compress files when you’re working offline on your PC.
How to Compress PDFs for Email on Mobile.
The Adobe online compression tool is incredibly useful on the go as well, as you can use the website on your phone to compress files when you don’t have access to your PC. You can do this by either the online Adobe compression tool or using the Acrobat App. Follow these simple steps to reduce the size of PDF for email on your iOS or Android device:
- Download the Acrobat Reader app for Android or iOS. (With a paid subscription).
- Sign in to the app.
- Select the + icon in the bottom right, followed by the Edit PDF option.
- Upload the PDF from device storage or the cloud.
- Press the Edit button in the bottom right.
- Select Compress PDF.
- Choose your compression level and process the file.
- Your newly-compressed document will appear on the app home page.
- You can then download the file locally or select the Send a Copy option to share the file.
FAQs.
It’s simple to zip a large PDF file and send it via email. If you’re using your desktop computer, simply right-click the document in question and hover over the Zip options in the context menu. Doing this will present a new range of options, from which you should pick ‘Compress and email…’. A pop-up menu of your default email service will appear, allowing you to add the recipient and send the zipped PDF file.
The recipient will be able to open the file by downloading it from the email. Right-click it and select ‘extract here. The PDF will then open in Adobe Reader.
Related content.
How to Make a PDF Shareable Link.
