Choose the workflow before choosing a preset
OmniKit’s PDF compressor renders each page, encodes that rendering as a JPEG, and creates a new PDF from those page images. This can help a scan. It can also turn an efficient text document into a larger file with no selectable text. “Compression complete” tells you that processing finished, not that the new document is better.
The following pair of original one-page documents makes the distinction visible. Both are 540 × 720 PDF points. The scan contains only an image; the text document contains searchable text. Neither includes private information or customer content.
What happened in the reference run
| Document | Original bytes | Output bytes | Selectable text |
|---|---|---|---|
| Image-only page | 195,313 | 144,075 | Absent before and after |
| Text page | 1,487 | 62,166 | Present before; absent after |
The reference uses the tool’s Balanced settings: 132 DPI and JPEG quality 0.75. The scan became smaller, while the text document became much larger. Both output files retain one page and the same page dimensions. Searching for OK-2026-0905 works in the text original and not in its image-only output.
Repeat it in the actual tool
- Open PDF compression and load the scan original. Select Balanced and process it. Record both sizes and check small text at a readable zoom.
- Load the text original. The content analysis should detect searchable text. Read the flattening notice before confirming that an image-only copy is acceptable.
- Process the text document. Download it and try selecting text or searching for the reference code.
- Keep each original beside its output. Choose the original whenever the output is larger or loses a capability you need.
A useful decision before uploading a document
| What you need | Recommended next step |
|---|---|
| Smaller scan for sharing | Try compression, then inspect all pages |
| Selectable text or copyable tables | Preserve the source; this compressor does not preserve the text layer |
| Reorder or remove pages | Use PDF organization and inspect the exported file |
| Editable text from a scan | Use OCR and check names, amounts, punctuation, and reading order |
| Forms, links, or certificate signatures | Retain the original; image-only compression flattens these features |
OCR can recover a draft of visible text, but it does not restore the original form fields, links, or certificate signature. A tiny file is not a useful result if it breaks the task the recipient needs to complete. Download a new copy and retain the original until the result has been checked.