1 MB is the most common cap on upload forms: job portals, university applications, visa and tax systems, court e-filing. Most documents can get under it without visible damage, because what makes a PDF heavy is almost always the images inside it — phone photos of pages, scanned sheets, pasted screenshots. Text and vector drawings take very little space and are rarely the problem.
Use Target size instead of guessing
Compress PDF has two modes. Quality preset applies one fixed level — Lossless, Light, Balanced or Strong — and you see what comes out. Target size works the other way round: you type the limit in megabytes, and the tool tries progressively stronger settings until the file fits.
It starts with a lossless clean-up that repacks the file's structure without touching a single image, then moves to images at 300 dpi, 150 dpi and 72 dpi, and finally 50 and 36 dpi. It stops at the first step that lands under your target, so you get the best quality that fits rather than the smallest possible file. If your PDF is already under the limit, it comes back unchanged.
Aim slightly under the limit
Megabytes are counted two ways. PDFStaple counts 1 MB as 1,024 × 1,024 bytes (1,048,576), while some upload forms count an even 1,000,000 bytes — so a file that is "1 MB" by one definition can be rejected as 1.05 MB by the other. Enter 0.95 instead of 1 and the result fits under either.
What gets smaller, and what doesn't
Text is never turned into an image. It stays real, selectable, searchable text at every step, so contracts and forms stay crisp. Photos and scans are resampled to a lower resolution: at 150 dpi a scanned page still prints and reads well, at 72 dpi it is fine on screen but soft on paper, and at 36 dpi small print in a scan starts to blur. Look over the result before you submit it.
If it still doesn't fit
A document that is mostly text almost always fits. Long scans are harder: forty pages scanned in color can stay above 1 MB even at the strongest step, and the tool then returns the smallest version it managed rather than failing. Check the size before you upload. Three things help.
Tick Also convert to grayscale. Color scans of black-on-white paper spend most of their bytes on color nobody needs, and dropping it is often the biggest single saving.
Remove the pages the form doesn't need — blank backs of double-sided scans, cover sheets, duplicates — with Remove pages before compressing.
If the portal accepts several files, split the document and compress each part to the limit separately, instead of crushing one file until it is unreadable.
Where your file goes
Compression runs on our servers, because it relies on Ghostscript. Uploads are deleted two hours later, or straight away when you choose Delete my files from the server now. Files up to 50 MB each are free.
Step by step
- Open Compress PDF — Add your file to the Compress PDF tool.
- Choose Target size — Switch the mode from Quality preset to Target size and enter 0.95.
- Add grayscale for scans — For color scans of ordinary documents, tick Also convert to grayscale.
- Check and download — Compare the new size with your limit, look over the pages, and download.