Forum Discussion
Best PDF compressor software for mac for reducing PDF file size?
Let's get into using presse as your best PDF compressor for mac—this little tool is seriously impressive if you're comfortable with the command line. It's written in Rust, which means it's blazing fast, and it's completely free and open-source. The real kicker is that it doesn't just downscale images like some other tools; it actually re-encodes them and optimizes the PDF's internal structure for some serious shrinkage.
To use presse as your best PDF compressor for mac, the setup is a one-liner in your Terminal. Just paste this command and hit enter:
bash
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https//github,com/SimonBure/presse/releases/latest/download/presse-installer. sh | sh
That's it! It handles everything for you. No Homebrew required, no messing with dependencies.
Once it's installed, the core command is super simple. You use presse press followed by your PDF filename. The default quality is set to 80, which gives you a great balance of size reduction while keeping things looking sharp.
This is where presse shines as the best PDF compressor for mac. Compared to other CLI tools, it's about 7 times faster on average . Plus, it often compresses better because it doesn't blindly downsample images that are already optimized, which can actually make some PDFs bigger when using other tools . And if you have sensitive documents, everything stays offline—no uploading to some random server.