Developer builds browser-only PDF compressor that never uploads your files
A developer added a client-side PDF compression tool to ToolHub, designed so that no file data ever leaves the user's browser. Each PDF page is rendered as an image using a pdf.js pipeline, recompressed via a canvas-based quality slider, and reassembled into a new PDF using pdf-lib. Testing on a 4.7MB image-heavy PDF achieved a 72% size reduction, with output verified using pypdf to confirm image integrity. The approach comes with a noted tradeoff: because pages are converted to images, text in the compressed output is no longer selectable or searchable. The tool is recommended for image-heavy or scanned PDFs and openly discloses this limitation to users upfront.
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