How to make a PDF under 200 KB — the ceiling for scholarship documents
On NSP, every document must be under 200 KB — marksheet, certificate, everything — and the real solution is greyscale scanning.
PDF under 200 KB specification
| Requirement | Value |
|---|---|
| National Scholarship Portal | The format of the file should be .pdf or .jpeg and the size of each document should not exceed 200 kb |
| UPSC supporting documents | PDF, 50 KB to 300 KB |
| A4 scan benchmark | An A4 page colour-scanned at 100 dpi is about 200-250 kb, so 200 dpi greyscale is the safer setting |
| Pages per file | Each document category should be a single file, not one upload per page |
| What to compress | Colour depth and dpi first; page count and cropping second |
Source: Frequently Asked Questions (National Scholarship Portal) (FAQ PDF on scholarships.gov.in, read September 2026). checked on 2026-09-08.
The hardest PDF limit students meet
Two hundred kilobytes for an entire document is tight, and it is exactly what the National Scholarship Portal FAQ requires: the format should be .pdf or .jpeg and the size of each document should not exceed 200 kb. Every marksheet, income certificate and caste certificate has to fit, not just the photograph.
Colour is what makes scans heavy
A phone scanner app defaults to colour at 300 dpi, which stores the cream tint of the paper, the shadow of your hand and the texture of the page. Switch to greyscale and drop to 200 dpi and the same page becomes readable at a fraction of the size. Reduce dpi below about 150 and small print starts to break up — so trade colour first, resolution last.
Related official limits
UPSC's uploading sheet asks for supporting documents as PDFs between 50 KB and 300 KB, which is the same discipline with slightly more room. And if you are uploading photographs of pages rather than scans, use the photo-to-PDF tool: it lets you set the target size while the pages are still images, which produces a smaller final PDF than compressing afterwards.
How it works
- Scan or photograph each certificate on a flat surface in even light.
- Convert text pages to greyscale and set the resolution to about 200 dpi.
- Combine all pages of one document into a single PDF.
- Compress to under 200 KB, aiming for about 150 KB.
- Open the PDF and read the smallest text and any seal or stamp.
- Upload one file per document category, as the portal expects.