You exported a five-page document and it came out at 38MB. Something is very wrong, and you can already tell email won't be happy.
Oversized PDFs almost always come from one of three things. Once you know which, the fix takes seconds.
What's actually going wrong
High-resolution images. If you dropped a 24MP photo into a Word doc and exported, the photo is sitting inside your PDF at full resolution even though it's displayed at thumbnail size. Embedded fonts. Every font face used gets bundled into the PDF — for branded templates with five typefaces and weights, that's easily 4MB before you've written a word. Scanned-as-image pages. Scanners often produce one full-resolution colour image per page, even for plain black-on-white text.
Quick test: how many images does your document have, and were any of the pages scanned? That tells you which culprit you're dealing with.
The quick fix
Run the file through compress PDF. Flint's compressor downsamples images intelligently — keeping photos crisp at screen resolution while flattening huge embedded source files. For most documents you'll see a 60-90% size reduction with no visible quality loss.
If the file is mostly scans, the savings are even bigger. A 100MB scanned contract often comes out under 5MB after compression.
If that didn't work
If compression doesn't shrink the file much, the bloat isn't from images. It's likely font embedding or invisible objects. Try converting to Word and back to PDF — the round trip strips embedded fonts and rebuilds the page tree cleanly.
For presentations and design files, re-export from source with image compression turned on at the export step rather than after the fact.
Prevent it next time
Resize images before placing them. A photo displayed at 4cm wide only needs to be 500px wide. Use system fonts or one branded typeface rather than five. And when scanning text-only documents, scan in black-and-white at 300dpi rather than colour at 600dpi.
FAQ
How small can a PDF actually get?
Text-only PDFs can be under 100KB. Documents with photos typically land between 500KB and 5MB after compression. Anything larger usually has either uncompressed images or scanned image-pages that haven't been flattened.
Does compressing a PDF lose quality?
Flint's compressor downsamples images to screen-readable resolution rather than re-encoding aggressively. For documents read on screens, the loss is imperceptible. For print at large sizes, use the lighter compression setting.
Why is my one-page PDF over 10MB?
Almost certainly a single embedded high-resolution image. Either the page is a scan, or you dropped a photo at full resolution. Compress the PDF — single-page bloat usually vanishes immediately.
Can I compress a password-protected PDF?
Not without removing the password first. Unlock the PDF using your password, then compress, then re-apply a password if you need one.
Don't accept a 50MB document. Compress PDF in Flint, and most files lose 80% of their weight without you noticing the difference.