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Getting a PDF under 100 KB
100 KB is tight, but it depends on what is in the file. A PDF made straight from a document, exported from Word or a web form, is mostly text, and text takes almost no space. Those usually fit after the lossless pass alone. Scanned pages are photos of paper, and those are what have to shrink.
For scans we lower the resolution of the page images one step at a time, down to 50 dpi at the lowest setting, and stop at the first step that fits. Anything drawn as real text stays sharp at every step; only images lose detail.
Tips
- Scan one page per file if the form allows it. Every scanned page adds to the size.
- Scan in grayscale or black and white when color does not matter. It compresses far better than color.
- Crop the scan to the edge of the document. A strip of scanner lid still costs bytes.
Questions
Is grayscale as small as black and white for a 100 KB PDF?
Not usually. Grayscale images are stepped down with the color settings and saved as JPEG, while one-bit black and white images follow a separate ladder. Uncompressed, an A4 page at 600 dpi is about 34.8 MB in grayscale (one byte per pixel) and about 4.4 MB in black and white (one bit per pixel).
Does a 100 KB limit mean 100,000 or 102,400 bytes?
Portals count it differently, so we aim under 100,000 bytes. That passes a portal counting 1000 bytes per KB and one counting 1024, which would allow up to 102,400. Your computer may show the result as about 97 KB, because a file of exactly 100,000 bytes reads as 97.7 KB when counted in 1024s.
Does compressing to 100 KB remove my name and other details stored in the PDF?
The document information fields, such as author, title and the program that made the file, are cleared along with the XMP metadata during the first, lossless pass. What is printed on the pages stays as it was. Those hidden fields are usually small, but every byte counts at 100 KB.