PDF under 1 MB — appointment letters and multi-page scans
The 1 MB PDF limit is for multi-page documents — three to five A4 pages at 200 dpi greyscale fit comfortably within it.
PDF under 1 MB specification
| Requirement | Value |
|---|---|
| GST proof of appointment | Proof of appointment of the authorised signatory, up to 1 MB |
| Rajasthan Sanstha Aadhaar | ID proof images accepted up to 1 MB before compression |
| How much fits | About three to five A4 text pages at 200 dpi greyscale |
| MB counting | 1 MB is 1024 KB in binary counting, but many portals implement it as 1000 KB |
| Safe target | 900 KB or lower, so either interpretation passes |
Source: Manual — Registration Application, Normal Taxpayer (GST portal) (undated help page (notes a 27 December 2018 change); read September 2026). checked on 2026-09-06. The user manual allows 'PDF or JPEG' for the photograph while the GST document checklist says JPG only. Both agree on the 100 KB ceiling.
Where a megabyte is the rule
The GST registration manual allows up to 1 MB for the proof of appointment of the authorised signatory — a board resolution, letter of authorisation or similar document that often runs to two or three pages. On the same form, each photograph is capped at 100 KB, so the two limits need completely different handling.
Merge before you compress
Compressing three separate PDFs and then joining them produces a bigger file than joining first and compressing once, because the compressor can share image dictionaries and drop duplicated resources across pages. It is also what portals expect: one file per document category, not one upload per page.
The blank-page trap
The GST portal has a specific error for empty uploads: the document uploaded is blank. It appears more often than you would think, because scanner apps occasionally write an empty page when a capture is cancelled. Always open the finished PDF and scroll through it once. At this size limit you have enough room to keep 200 dpi, so there is no reason for the text to be unreadable — and the document checklist is worth reading alongside the manual, since the two pages differ on formats.
How it works
- Collect every page of the document you need to upload.
- Scan at 200 dpi, greyscale for text and True Colour only where a seal matters.
- Merge all pages into a single PDF.
- Compress to about 900 KB to stay clear of both 1000 KB and 1024 KB readings.
- Open the result and check names, dates and signatures are legible.
- Upload on a stable connection, since bigger files fail mid-transfer more often.