Stop Bloating Your GitHub Releases: Compress Project Docs to Exact Sizes

If you maintain an open-source project, you've probably hit this:

• You generate a 40-page contributor guide with diagrams → 18MB
• GitHub Releases has no hard limit, but clone times get slower for everyone
• Some mirror sites do have limits
• Your git clone gets slower over time as PDFs bloat the repo

I built TinyPDF for designers first, but I've been using it for my own project docs too: type the target size in MB, and it compresses to that size while preserving layout and readability as much as possible.

https://tinypdf.cn/?utm_source=devto&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=opensource_docs&utm_content=devto_opensource_2026-07-22

No account, no watermarks, 100% free, works entirely in your browser (no server uploads).

Bonus: if you're using GitHub Actions, you could wire this into your release pipeline (the compression runs locally in-browser right now, but I'm thinking about a CLI version).

What's the biggest PDF you've committed to a repo? Let's compare in the comments.