PDF size limits — 200 KB, 500 KB and 1 MB uploads

PDF rules are almost always ceilings rather than windows, which makes them simpler than image rules but easier to fail, because a document is several pages of photographed paper rather than one small picture.

Two hundred kilobytes is the tightest common cap. The national scholarship portal's guidance limits each attached document to that figure and accepts PDF or JPEG. On a single page it is comfortable; across four pages it forces greyscale.

Five hundred kilobytes is the most widespread limit in Indian government uploads. Banking recruitment guidelines ask for each supporting document as an A4 PDF within that cap, scanned at two hundred dots per inch in true colour. A consular document upload uses the same ceiling and adds a useful hint: A4 in colour at one hundred dots per inch lands around two hundred to two hundred and fifty kilobytes, which tells you the limit was set with real scans in mind.

One megabyte appears on identity-proof uploads and on some state portals, and it is generous enough that a well captured three or four page scan needs no compression at all.

Each page converts the ceiling into a per-page budget, lists the portals we have read, and explains the two settings that do most of the work: greyscale for text pages, and two hundred dots per inch instead of six hundred. Pages for other numbers now point at the compressor with the target pre-filled, because the advice does not change with the number.

Before you upload anything, read the field label rather than the general instruction sheet. A surprising number of failed submissions are documents wrapped correctly to a size limit and then placed in a field that wanted a JPEG, or a photograph converted into a PDF because the word document appeared somewhere on the page.

One more caution about legibility. Compression softens the smallest marks on a page first, and on scanned certificates the smallest marks are digits: a roll number, a percentage, a date of birth. Read those figures in the finished file before you submit, and if any of them has become ambiguous, split the upload or drop a page instead of pushing the quality lower.