Compress a PDF to under 200 KB

Who asks for 200 KB

200 KB is the second most common hard cap on document uploads after 100 KB, and it turns up in a recognisable set of places: recruitment portals that take a CV plus certificates, exam boards collecting mark sheets, insurance claim forms, and the "supporting documents" step of a lot of public-sector applications. Many Indian competitive-exam systems in particular publish limits somewhere between 50 KB and 200 KB per attachment.

The useful thing about 200 KB rather than 100 KB is that it is roughly one full quality step of headroom — enough that a two- or three-page document stops looking compressed.

What doubling the budget actually changes

JPEG size does not scale linearly with quality, so twice the bytes is not twice the detail. In practice, going from 100 KB to 200 KB on the same document buys you one of these:

• about 40 more DPI at the same JPEG quality — the difference between 110 and 150 DPI;
• or roughly 15–20 points of JPEG quality at the same resolution, which is the difference between visible blocking and none;
• or twice as many pages at the same appearance.

The tool chooses for you by default, favouring resolution first (so text stays sharp) and then quality. Override it in the resolution options if you would rather have a softer but higher-resolution page.

A checklist for application uploads

1. Read the spec again. Portals often set a separate, smaller limit for the photograph and signature than for the document. A 200 KB document limit does not mean the photo may be 200 KB.
2. Match the page count they asked for. Uploading a ten-page scan when two were requested wastes four-fifths of the budget and is frequently rejected anyway.
3. Keep the file name plain. Some legacy upload handlers choke on spaces, brackets or non-ASCII characters. surname-marksheet.pdf is a safe shape.
4. Open the result before you submit. The per-page table tells you the numbers; your eyes tell you whether the registration number is still readable.

If your source is a photograph rather than a scan

Phone photos of documents compress badly because they carry things a scan does not: uneven lighting, a gradient across the page, camera noise in the shadows, and a background. All of that is high-frequency detail that JPEG spends bytes on and you do not want.

• Use your phone's built-in document scanner (Notes on iOS, Google Drive on Android) rather than the camera app. It flattens the perspective and thresholds the background.
• Shoot on a plain, evenly lit surface with no shadow across the page.
• Turn on grayscale here if the ink is black. Colour noise across a white page is pure wasted budget.

No queue, no daily limit, no account

Application season means compressing the same set of documents several times as you discover each portal's particular rules. Upload-based compressors meter that — two or three files a day on the free tier is typical, and the counter does not care that you are re-doing the same document. Here the encoder is running in your browser, so the twentieth attempt costs exactly what the first one did.

If 200 KB turns out to be the wrong target, the same engine is available at 100 KB, 300 KB, 500 KB or any size you type in.