1 MB and 2 MB are the most common limits on application portals, university systems and support forms. They are generous compared with 100 KB, and most documents can get under them without becoming hard to read.
Why your PDF is over 1 MB
- Scans and phone photos. Each scanned page is a large image. A few pages from a phone camera can easily add up to several megabytes.
- Embedded images. Photos or high-resolution logos inside a document exported from Word, Google Docs or a design tool.
- Many pages. A long report at a modest size per page still adds up.
- Fonts. Some PDFs embed whole font files. This is usually a smaller effect than images.
If the large part of the file is images, compression has a lot to work with. If it is mostly text and fonts, it has much less.
Steps with PDFTuck
- Tap Select PDF and choose the file.
- Tap 1 MB (or 2 MB). These are presets, alongside 200 KB, 500 KB, 5 MB and 10 MB. For something like 1.5 MB, choose Custom.
- Tap Compress PDF. PDFTuck tests up to seven quality settings and keeps the best-looking result that is at or under your limit. You can cancel while it works.
- Check the result: original size, new size, how much was saved, and whether the target was met.
- Open Preview, zoom into the smallest text, then Save PDF or Share.
If the file is already under your limit, PDFTuck tells you it already fits, so you don’t compress for nothing.
If you’d rather choose quality than a size
When there is no strict limit, skip the target and choose a quality mode instead: High quality, Balanced or Smallest file. This is useful for email attachments or when you simply want a lighter file.
Check before you upload
Compression is a trade: smaller files come from smaller, softer images. Before you submit anything important:
- Zoom in on numbers, dates, signatures and stamps.
- Make sure every page is there and in the right order.
- If you need to search or copy text later, keep the original too. Depending on the document, compressed pages may become images, in which case text is no longer searchable and links and form fields are not kept.
If it still won’t fit
PDFTuck says Best readable result when it can’t reach 1 MB safely. Try stronger compression (it warns that readability may drop), or reduce the document itself: remove unneeded pages, split it into parts if the portal allows more than one file, or rescan at a lower resolution.
A note on “1 MB”
PDFTuck uses decimal units: 1 MB is 1,000,000 bytes. Some portals mean 1,048,576 bytes. Either way, a file that PDFTuck reports as under 1 MB is under the portal’s limit too.