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Compress a PDF under 1MB — for university and job portals.
University application portals, civil service applications, and many job sites still cap PDF uploads at 1MB. letsgoPDF's High preset typically gets text-heavy PDFs to 200-700KB — small enough to clear the limit without obvious quality loss.
Why your portal won't accept the file
Most universities and government portals were built when 1MB was a generous attachment cap. The limit is enforced server-side — the upload simply rejects anything bigger. You can't work around the cap, but you can shrink the file to fit. Common situations we see:
- UCAS, Common App, university portals. 1MB or 2MB caps for transcripts, statements of purpose, recommendation letters.
- Civil-service applications. UK Civil Service Jobs, USAJobs, and EU institutions cap individual attachments at 1-5MB.
- Job application forms. Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, Taleo — all default to 1-5MB caps for resumes and supporting docs.
- Bank and insurance forms. Statement uploads frequently capped at 1-2MB.
How letsgoPDF gets you under 1MB
- Drop the PDF onto the toolkit. Pick Compress — or click the button above to open it directly.
- Choose High compression. This downsamples embedded images to ~96 DPI (still legible for screen review) and re-encodes them as JPEG, which is what produces most of the size reduction in a real PDF.
- Click Apply. The output downloads and saves to your local history (IndexedDB, not a server). If it's still over 1MB, see the tips below.
If High compression isn't enough
- Split first, then compress. A 50-page PDF is unlikely to fit 1MB. Use Split PDF to chop it into 10-page parts and compress each — most portals accept multiple uploads.
- Run OCR on scans first. Scanned PDFs are essentially folders of full-resolution images. OCR (in the main app) recognises the text and lets the compressor drop image quality without losing what people read.
- Re-export from the source. If you generated the PDF from Word, Pages, or LaTeX, re-exporting with image quality 'Medium' often beats any compressor. Compressors fight whatever encoding came in; the source doesn't have that overhead.
- Convert to grayscale. Colour PDFs with photos can be 3-4× the size of the same content in grayscale. If the portal doesn't require colour, exporting in grayscale before compressing often clears 1MB easily.
Common questions
- Will the text still be selectable after compression?
- Yes. We compress images and re-encode the file structure; the text layer is preserved. You can still copy-paste, search, and use screen readers.
- Why don't you compress in the browser like merge and split?
- Browser-only compression (pdf-lib, etc.) gives ~10-20% reduction at best because it can't re-encode embedded images aggressively. Real compression needs Ghostscript-class tooling, which is what our backend uses. Files transit encrypted; ConvertAPI deletes them after processing.
- Will the PDF still be searchable and accessible?
- Yes — text and metadata survive. Only embedded image quality drops.
- Is there a file count limit?
- 10 cloud conversions per month free, then $5/mo unlimited. Browser-only tools (merge, split, redact, sign, rotate) are unlimited free.