A 200 KB limit is generous for most documents
Two hundred kilobytes holds a typed document of many pages with no visible change, or several scanned pages that stay easy to read. Degree certificates with colour seals, multi-page experience letters, income tax returns and admission documents usually fit. Because the limit is roomier, the lossless first step succeeds more often here, and the PDF keeps its selectable, searchable text.
When colour is worth keeping
Some documents carry information in colour: a red or blue university seal, a coloured photograph on an identity document, or a stamp a reviewer looks for. At 200 KB there is usually room to keep colour, so leave black and white unticked unless the result looks blurred. For plain printed pages, black and white still gives sharper text at the same size.
Multi-page PDFs
The budget is shared by every page, so a ten-page PDF gives each page about 20 KB once redrawn. The tool spreads it evenly and chooses one sharpness level for the whole document, so no page ends up much worse than the others. If the result is hard to read, look at whether every page is needed: blank pages, instructions pages and duplicate copies are easy savings. The tool takes up to 100 pages at a time.
- Typed PDFs (from Word, a browser or an online portal) often stay text and fit easily.
- Scanned PDFs are redrawn. The result shows the DPI used; black and white lets printed pages keep a much higher DPI than colour at the same size.
- Photos of pages taken at an angle are best re-scanned with a scanner app first.
Checking the copy before you upload
The size shown in the result is the exact size of the download, aimed slightly under 200 KB so it passes whichever way a portal counts kilobytes. Open the file once: check that every page is there and that names and numbers are clear. For a tighter limit see compress PDF to 100 KB; with a little more room, compress PDF to 300 KB. For any other limit use compress PDF. Images have their own compress image to 200 KB.
Built on two open-source projects that run in your browser: qpdf, compiled to WebAssembly, for the lossless rewrite, and Mozilla's PDF.js to redraw pages when that is not enough.