Compress a PDF Under 100 KB for SSC, UPSC and Bank Exam Forms
The notification says it plainly: uploaded documents must not exceed 100 KB, and the form validates bytes, not intentions. A single phone scan of a mark sheet is ten times that. Candidates lose hours, and sometimes the application window, to a size box.
This is the exact workflow to land under 100 KB while keeping every character readable to the examiner, using tools that run on your phone browser with no upload anywhere.
Why 100 KB is achievable
A 100 KB budget is tight for a photograph and comfortable for a document, if the document is processed correctly. Text pages compress dramatically because flat colours and sharp edges survive re-encoding well. The enemy is a scan stored as a giant uncompressed image at copier resolution.
The lever order matters: dimensions first, quality second, page count third. Shrinking a 2480-pixel-wide scan to about 1200 pixels usually halves the bytes before quality is touched, and exam documents remain perfectly readable at that size.
The workflow that lands the target
- Start from the cleanest source you have; if the original scan is a photo, crop the page edges first with the Image Cropper so no bytes go to background.
- Open Compress PDF, add the file and run the strongest photo re-encoding preset; text and vector content is never touched, only embedded images.
- Check the reported output size against 100 KB. Still over? Reduce the scan resolution: re-export or re-photograph at lower DPI, or split multi-page files and upload only what the form asks for.
- For photos and signatures uploaded as images, the Image Compressor target-size mode types in the exact KB the notification demands and walks the quality steps for you.
Readability checks before you submit
- Open the final file on your phone and zoom: roll numbers, names, marks and stamps must stay legible.
Aim slightly under the limit; validators differ between 100000 and 102400 bytes.
Never re-compress an already compressed copy; go back to the original and run one clean pass.
Keep the uncompressed master on your device until the application is confirmed.
Why not just use any compression website
Mark sheets, ID documents and certificates are the most identity-sensitive files a student owns. Most free compressors upload them to a server to process, which is exactly the exposure you cannot audit. Every step above runs in your browser; the documents never leave the phone or laptop doing the work.
It is also faster on exam-day traffic: no queue, no upload of a ten-megabyte scan over mobile data, results at local speed.
Try it free: Compress PDF | runs entirely in your browser, no uploads and no signup.