I need to shrink a scanned PDF below 400 KB for an application portal, but everything I’ve tried makes the text unreadable. Has anyone found a compressor that actually keeps it legible?
Honestly, the easiest fix is switching the scan to grayscale first so colors dont bloat it. If you cant rescan, try running it through ilovepdf on medium. Extreme compression usually destroys text, but medium usually keeps it readable under portal limits.
That limit is frustrating with scanned documents. I would OCR it first, then export as grayscale at 150 dpi with medium JPEG quality; this usually keeps text readable while cutting size much more than ordinary PDF compression. PDF24 Creator or Adobe Acrobat can do this, though a multi-page scan may still be impossible to fit below 400 KB without reducing resolution further.