How to compress a pdf file to reduce the size before emailing on Windows?

Try to open the PDF file from chrome browser, and print-to-pdf through the browser instead of adobe. The file size should be a lot more reasonable from my experience. 

That actually works surprisingly well for compressing PDFs files, especially ones bloated with embedded metadata, editing history, forms, annotations, or unnecessarily high-quality assets.

How to compress PDF file size on Windows 11/10 before emailing:

1. Open the PDF in Google Chrome.

2. Press Ctrl + P.

3. Set the printer to Save as PDF or Microsoft Print to PDF.

4. In “More settings,” lower the scale or simplify options if needed.

5. Click Save and create a new PDF.

This basically re-renders the document into a cleaner PDF and often strips out extra junk that Adobe preserves. In many cases, the output file becomes much smaller without noticeably hurting readability.

A few things to know though before reducing PDF file size:

• Interactive forms, bookmarks, hyperlinks, layers, or signatures may be removed.
• Searchable text usually stays intact if the original PDF already contained text.
• Scanned PDFs with huge images can still remain large, but often shrink a lot anyway.
• “Print to PDF” is sometimes faster and more effective than Acrobat’s default compression for everyday sharing.

If the PDF is mainly for viewing, emailing, uploading, or archiving, this trick is often one of the easiest solutions.