Vellum reduces the weight of a document by rasterizing its pages at the quality you choose. Processing happens on your device, which removes both the upload time and the usual size ceilings.
The ‘Light’ level recompresses losslessly and keeps text selectable; ‘Balanced’ and ‘Maximum’ rasterize the pages as JPEG at decreasing quality, which reduces the size more but turns the text into an image. Choose ‘Light’ if you still need to copy text, otherwise try ‘Balanced’ first.
Only the ‘Light’ level does, because it does not touch the content. The ‘Balanced’ and ‘Maximum’ levels convert each page into an image, so the text is no longer selectable or searchable after compression.
No, an encrypted file must be unlocked first. Compression itself is free and computed on your device, without the document being sent to a server.
Vellum — free PDF tools whose processing stays on your device.