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Does anyone have any tips for compressing PDFs to fit the 300 kb max for OSCAR? I'm using a longer-than-usual writing sample (an article I wrote) that's originally ~750 kb. No matter which of the online compressing websites I use, I can't seem to get it down smaller than 500 kb.

You can try to compress the document manually. Also make sure to get rid of special characters embedded within the article, use the original word doc when possible. I've found that getting rid of the table of contents helps cut it a bit. If none of those work, try using an excerpt of the article.

Thanks,

Anonymous User wrote:You can try to compress the document manually. Also make sure to get rid of special characters embedded within the article, use the original word doc when possible. I've found that getting rid of the table of contents helps cut it a bit. If none of those work, try using an excerpt of the article.

Thanks,

As suggested above, if at all possible, use a PDF created from a word processing document rather than a scanned copy of the piece. It will generally be smaller and your readers will, to a person, prefer something that isn't scanned.

The biggest bloat in computer-generated PDFs results from font embedding and pictures. To be clear, getting rid of "special characters" probably won't do much, as individual symbols in an embedded font do not change the size of the document very much. However, if you have a few stray characters in a *different* font, they might be causing the document to embed additional font sets that aren't necessary.

With regard to pictures, it's easiest to just get rid of them, rather than worry about compression settings.

You may also want to ensure that you're not embedding a lot of metadata. Disabling "add document information" in Acrobat can accomplish that trick.

ETA: Right now, I'm staring at a PDF I created from Word that has plentiful symbols and runs 22 pages. Using PDF version 1.5, the entire file is 50kb. That's not a bad benchmark.

Use SmallPDF: https://smallpdf.com/compress-pdf.