Hi all. I'm applying for a few jobs and one of the government portals only accepts PDF files under 2 MB. My CV with a photo plus scanned diplomas comes out at about 9 MB, and the upload just fails without any useful message. I tried printing to PDF again with lower quality, but it looks blurry and awful. Is there a simple way to shrink a PDF without turning the scans into mush? The deadline for two of the applications is this Friday, so I'd rather not spend days experimenting with different programs. I don't really want to buy software just for this.
Those portals with tiny upload limits are a pain, I hit the same wall applying for a city job last year. What worked for me was the Compress PDF tool on convert2pdf.com, it's free and doesn't need an account. My scanned diplomas went from about 7 MB to well under the limit, and the text was still perfectly readable. Results depend on the scans though: if the originals are huge high-resolution images, you might need to split the CV and the diplomas into separate files. They have a Split PDF tool for that as well. Since everything runs in the browser, there's no waiting for uploads. Check the compressed file by zooming in on the smallest text before you submit, just to be safe.
