Compress PDF to 100 KB

Indian e-governance forms are built for applicants on slow mobile connections and for servers that store millions of uploads in each recruitment or scholarship cycle. A per-document cap of 100 KB keeps both manageable, which is why you see it beside fields for caste, income and domicile certificates, mark sheets, passbook pages and identity proofs. The exact number is printed in the notification or next to the upload button; read it before you scan, because some forms also set a minimum such as 10 KB or 20 KB.

A phone scan of a single page is often 1–3 MB, because the scanner app saves a high-resolution color photo of the paper inside the PDF. Nothing about the words needs that many pixels. Certificate text stays readable at 150 DPI, and a seal or signature survives grayscale, so most of the 100 KB budget can go to the part of the page an officer actually checks.

With Target size selected, the compressor re-encodes every image in the PDF and measures the result against 100 KB. It lowers image quality first, because JPEG artefacts are barely visible on printed text at medium settings. If the file is still too large when quality reaches the Lowest image quality of 30, it reduces image resolution step by step instead of pushing quality into the range where letters grow halos.

Two sections of the settings matter most at this size. Convert to grayscale under Images removes the color channels from scans, often halving them, and a stamp or blue-ink signature is still clearly visible in gray. Under Document clean-up, Subset fonts and Remove metadata are already on; they trim embedded font data and edit history, which matters on typed PDFs exported from Word. For the trade-off between size and sharpness in general, read how to compress a PDF without losing quality.