Who writes here
These notes are written by Jimmy Dark, the person behind MillFile. MillFile is the tool on this site: it rebuilds a PDF to an exact size limit and converts camera RAW files to JPG, entirely inside your browser, with no server in the middle.
The code is open and the site has no account system, so everything claimed here can be checked against the repository rather than taken on trust.
What gets written here
Only things that were measured. When a number appears, it came out of an actual file rather than a specification, a marketing page or an estimate. Where a measurement had a limit - a setting that could not be controlled, one document rather than a corpus - that limit is written down in the text instead of quietly left out.
The other rule is narrower than it sounds: write about the thing that actually went wrong. A compressor that quietly replaces your text with a picture makes a better article than one that is merely fast, because the second one has nothing to teach.
Published
- Why PDF compression quietly turns your text into a picture - DEV Community, 2026-10-21
A 298.7 KB text PDF went to 8.9 KB with all 26,652 characters still selectable, while the usual render-to-images route reached 30.5 KB and zero. Includes the twenty-line fix, and why a bigger file is not a result.
Guides on this site
- Common App PDF size limit - Where the 2,000 KB figure comes from, and the unit conversion that rejects files which look small enough.
- Attachment size limits - What the upload limits on email, application portals and job boards actually measure.
- How it works - What the tool does to a PDF before it gives you one back.
Elsewhere
- Source code - https://github.com/funkyzx26-dot/millfile
- DEV Community - https://dev.to/funkyzx26
- X - https://x.com/funkyzx1