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A two-page PDF should not be 40 MB. Almost always one of six things is responsible, and each has a different fix.
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The single biggest cause. A 600 DPI scan of a colour page can be 20 MB on its own. Check with PDF Info — if the page is one big image, this is your answer.
Fix: re-encode pages at 150 DPI, or extract and downscale the images.
PNG is lossless, so a photograph stored as PNG can be 5–10× larger than the same photo as JPG. Screenshots exported as PNG inside a report do this constantly.
Fix: rasterise to JPG, or export images to JPG and rebuild the PDF.
Each embedded font subset can add hundreds of kilobytes. A document using eight decorative fonts carries all eight.
Fix: Safe mode strips redundancy but keeps fonts in use. Reducing font variety at the source is the real fix.
Poorly generated PDFs sometimes embed the same logo or background on every page as a separate object instead of reusing one.
Fix: a structural rebuild (Safe mode) can consolidate these.
Some editors append every save as an incremental update, so the file contains old versions of pages that are no longer visible.
Fix: a full rewrite (Safe mode does this) drops the stale revisions.
Email gateways and portals often reject files for reasons other than size — attachment limits include encoding overhead, which adds roughly a third.
A 9 MB file becomes a 12 MB attachment. If the limit is 10 MB, you are over even though the file "is" under.
Open PDF Info — it shows page count, page sizes and metadata. For image weight, Extract Images shows the embedded images and their dimensions.
No. A text-only PDF with embedded fonts may barely shrink. The gain depends entirely on what is taking the space.
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