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Compressing PDFs

Shrink a PDF while keeping text searchable: Smart vs. Aggressive, per-page strength 1–5, skip pages, and the before/after preview.

Deste can shrink a captured or added PDF without rasterizing text — text, fonts and vectors stay sharp and searchable; only raster images are re-encoded. That means you can still select, copy and search the text inside a compressed file. There are two entry points.

Two ways to compress

  • Per-document: In the Stacks view, the document card’s 3-dot menu has a green Compress button (only shown when the document has at least 1 page). It opens the Compression overlay; the result is written to a new file, and the original is kept.
  • While saving: From the bottom bar’s Save PDF, turn on the Compress while saving toggle (default off) to route the save through the same overlay. See Saving as PDF.

Smart vs. Aggressive

There are two Type buttons at the top of the overlay:

  • Smart — “Keeps text searchable; only re-encodes images.” Text, vectors and fonts are preserved; only raster images are re-encoded to MRC (mixed raster content).
  • Aggressive — “Compresses images harder; text stays sharp & searchable.” Text and vectors are still never rasterized, but images are downsampled/quantized harder for more size reduction (lower maximum width, lower quality).

Note: Neither mode rasterizes text. The only difference is how hard the images are squeezed — in Aggressive the text still stays crisp and searchable.

Compression strength

Five buttons from 1–5, labeled Smaller ↔ Higher quality. 1 = smallest file / most aggressive image compression; 5 = highest quality / largest file. You set the strength per page.

Color / black-and-white

A Black & white toggle in the overlay converts to grayscale during compression to reduce the color space.

Per-page control

  • Prev / Page {N} / {M} / Next lets you navigate across pages.
  • A Skip this page toggle (red) excludes the current page from compression; that page is kept verbatim.
  • The Apply to all pages button copies the current level and skip state to every page.
  • Footer status: “X / Y pages will be compressed” (excluding skipped pages). If the master toggle is off: “The document will be saved without compression.”

Before / after preview

Two framed panes sit side by side: Before | After. Each shows the rendered page (pdfium) plus its file size below (for example 245 KB → 89 KB). While a preview is generated, a Calculating… overlay appears on top; updates are debounced by ~200 ms and rapid changes are coalesced into one.

Output and safety

  • The result is always written to a new file (you pick the location in a save dialog); the original PDF is left untouched. The footer reads: “Saves to a new file; the original is kept.”
  • Never-inflate: In Smart mode, if a compressed page would be larger than the original, Deste reverts to copying that page uncompressed — output is always less than or equal to the original size.
  • Footer button: Compress & save (or Save when the master toggle is off).

When it is unavailable

Compression needs the helper engine rustpdfcompressor.exe in %LOCALAPPDATA%\Deste. If it is missing, the overlay/toggle gracefully degrades to an uncompressed save (no error dialog). It helps to know this so you understand why compression may not appear; for details see Troubleshooting.

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