Compress PDF to 300 KB

PDF has been an ISO standard since 2008, and its archival profile, PDF/A, since 2005. Both put the same promise at the center: a PDF should look the same on every device years later. That is why the compressor never removes the fonts a page needs. It keeps them embedded and only drops the characters a document never uses, which is called subsetting.

For an admission file this matters more than it sounds. A reviewer may open your transcript on a different operating system from yours, with none of your fonts installed. If the font was stripped to save space, the grades could reflow or show as empty boxes. Keeping fonts embedded costs a few kilobytes and protects the part that counts.

The timeline above shows how long PDF has been stable. Files made with tools from very different decades still open the same way today, and a compressed copy written now follows the same rules.

One public example is the Campus France India student file. Its help page lists mark sheets, degree certificates, a resume, an experience letter and a photo, and says each document should not exceed 300 KB. Indian state recruitment and exam notices also use limits in this range for identity proofs, though the numbers differ between notices and between document types.

Because these portals handle many documents per applicant, the rule is usually per file. That makes batch compression the natural fit: put the whole checklist in one run and every file is compressed separately against the same 300 KB target. Pages that are already small, such as a resume exported from a word processor, are barely touched.

A degree certificate is usually one page, but a set of mark sheets can run to six or eight. Scanned in color at a high resolution, that is far beyond 300 KB, and compressing it all the way down would leave each page at a resolution where small numbers blur. Check first whether the portal accepts one file per year or per semester; uploading separate files gives each page more room.

When everything must be in one file, scan in grayscale at 150 dpi, crop to the paper and compress that. You can also pull the pages you need out of a longer scan with Split PDF. If you still have a little space left under the limit, raise Lowest image quality under Advanced settings so the figures stay crisp.

Pictures are the main target, but not the only one. Remove metadata is on by default and deletes the author name, the software used and any editing history stored inside the PDF. On an application document that is a privacy gain as much as a size gain, since a scan app can record your device name or the original file path.

Unused objects go too. PDFs that were edited several times often carry old versions of pages or images that no longer appear anywhere, and a compressed copy is written fresh without them. Form fields stay fillable unless you tick Flatten form fields, which is worth doing only on a final copy you will not edit again.

If you need to change the order of documents or combine two short ones into a single upload, Merge PDF does that first; compress the merged file afterward so the size check applies to what you actually submit. The settings used here are the same as on the main Compress PDF page, preset to 300 KB.