Make my PDF smaller

When you need this

The portal says maximum 2MB. Your scanned certificate is 11MB. This is the single most common reason a Ghanaian application form refuses a document, and it almost never means anything is wrong with the document itself — a scanner saved every page as a full-quality photograph.

How to use it

1. Open the PDF and tell the tool the limit the portal gave you, in KB or MB.
2. Let it work down to that size. It tries the gentlest reduction first and only goes further if it has to.
3. Open the result and read it before uploading. If the smallest text has gone soft, raise the limit a little and try again.

What it does and does not do

• It shrinks pictures, not words. Most of the weight in a scanned document is image data. Text is already tiny by comparison.
• It will not make a text PDF bigger. If a document is already small and mostly text, there is nothing to squeeze, and the tool hands back your original rather than returning something larger and pretending that is an improvement.
• Compression cannot be undone. Keep the original. If the reduced copy is unreadable, you want the file you started with.
• There is a floor. A twenty-page colour scan will not become 200KB and still be legible. If you cannot reach the limit, the fix is usually fewer pages (split, delete or reorder) or a better original.

If something goes wrong

• The text is blurry afterwards. You asked for too small a file. Try a larger limit, or rescan the pages with scan a document with my camera, which produces much smaller files than a photograph does.
• Nothing happens. The document may be locked. Open it first with take the password off my PDF.
• The portal still refuses it. Check what it is actually complaining about. Size is the usual reason, but page count, file type and a password on the file are all common too.