How to Compress a PDF Under 200 KB or 500 KB for Government Portals

Updated 26 September 2026 · 2 min read

Practical settings to shrink scanned certificates and marksheets below strict PDF size limits without making them unreadable.

Portals often limit PDFs to 200 KB, 300 KB, 500 KB or 1 MB. Scanned documents are usually the problem because every page is a large image.

Best settings

1. Open Compress PDF and choose Scanned / Image-heavy PDF.
2. Start with Medium quality and 100% render scale. Check the new size.
3. Still too big? Try Low quality and a render scale of 70–80%.
4. Zoom the preview to make sure text and stamps are still readable.

Other ways to save space

• Remove extra pages (blank backs, instructions) with Delete PDF Pages.
• Scan in grayscale if colour isn't required.
• Make the PDF from photos with JPG to PDF after reducing each photo with JPEG Size Reduce.

Typed PDFs

For PDFs created on a computer (not scanned), use Text Document mode — it keeps text selectable. Savings are smaller because such files are already efficient.