Hosted at: https://austegard.com/pdf-compressor.html
Modern browsers are incredibly powerful. If you’ve ever tried Squoosh.app’s client‑side image compression, you know just how slick a fully‑in‑browser workflow can feel. What if we extended that idea to PDFs—shrinking large documents without ever sending them to a server?
In this post I’ll walk through how we built PDF Compressor, a 100% client‑side PDF optimizer written in pure HTML/JS/WebAssembly. We started with a Claude 3.7 Sonnet–generated plan, iterated with ChatGPT o4‑mini‑high, and ended up with a reasonabvly‑fast, vector‑preserving compressor powered by Ghostscript‑WASM.