PDF Minimizer

A lightweight macOS app that compresses PDFs by rasterizing pages as JPEG.
Target size mode · Manual DPI/quality control · Drag & drop · Universal Binary (arm64 + x86_64)

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Renders each PDF page as a JPEG-compressed bitmap and rebuilds the PDF. Useful when a fax service or upload form has a hard file size limit.

Features

• Two compression modes:
  • Target size — set a maximum file size (e.g. 10 MB) and the app finds the best DPI/quality combination automatically
  • Manual — choose DPI (72–300) and JPEG quality (10–100%) yourself
• Drag & drop a PDF onto the window or the Dock icon
• Replace original file option to overwrite the source PDF directly
• Shows original size, compressed size, and reduction percentage
• Outputs a new file with _minimized suffix by default

Download

Download the latest universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel) from the Releases page.

Opening the app (unsigned)

Since the app is not signed with an Apple Developer certificate, macOS will block it on first launch. To open it:

1. Right-click (or Control-click) on PDF Minimizer.app
2. Select Open from the context menu
3. Click Open in the dialog that appears

You only need to do this once. After that, the app will open normally.

Alternatively, you can remove the quarantine attribute via Terminal:

xattr -d com.apple.quarantine "PDF Minimizer.app"

Build from source

Requires Xcode Command Line Tools on macOS 12.0 or later.

# Debug build (current architecture)
./build.sh

# Universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel)
./build-universal.sh

The built app will be in build/ or build-universal/universal/.

License

MIT