Compress guide

How to compress a PDF to 100 KB or 200 KB for online forms

By Yadraj Meena · Updated 9 October 2026 · 3 min read

Admission portals, job applications and exam forms in India often accept PDFs only up to 100 KB, 200 KB or 500 KB. Here is how to get under the limit while keeping your document readable.

Why portals set size limits

Government and school portals receive lakhs of uploads during an admission or recruitment season. Small limits keep their servers fast. The problem is that a phone scan of a single certificate can easily be 2 to 5 MB, and simply squeezing it can make the text unreadable for the official who checks it.

Step by step

1. Open Compress PDF and drop your PDF on the page. Nothing is uploaded; the file stays on your device.
2. First try Best quality. It re-saves only the photos and scans inside the PDF and removes unused data, so text, lines and signatures stay exactly as they are. Many phone scans shrink by 70 to 90 percent this way.
3. If the portal has a strict limit, choose To an exact size in KB, type the limit (for example 100) or tap one of the quick buttons, and press Compress PDF.
4. The tool shrinks images step by step and stops at the sharpest version that fits. The result card tells you the final size and how it was achieved.
5. Download the file and open it once to check that every line is readable before you upload it.

When the file still will not fit

• Remove pages you don't need. Blank backs of scanned pages are a common cause. Use Remove pages first.
• Allow pictures. Tick “turn pages into pictures” to go further. Text is no longer selectable, but a 100 KB target becomes reachable for most 1 to 3 page documents.
• Allow grayscale. Colour costs space. Most portals accept black-and-white certificates.
• Split large files. Some forms allow separate uploads for each document. Split PDF can separate them.

KB versus kB

Most Indian portals count 1 KB as 1024 bytes. The tool uses the same rule, so a file shown as 99 KB here will be accepted by a 100 KB limit.

Tips for better scans

Scan in good daylight, keep the page flat and fill the frame with the document. A clean scan compresses much better than a dark, shadowed one, so the final file is both smaller and clearer.