Document quality 😬

[Alexsea 45]

Hello! 🙋🏼‍♀️ I'm sure this has been asked - I've looked through the search results and saw some related topics but can't find exactly what I'm looking for - but I have a question about the 2MB requirement for document uploads to NVC website.

 

After lots of compressing/rescanning, we have our docs at just under 2MB. They are still readable, but the quality isn't GREAT. I wouldn't call them blurry, because they ARE still legible, but some of the text is definitely fuzzy and it's obvious they aren't high-res.

 

How "average" of quality is TOO average for NVC to accept the doc? Anyone have experience?

 

Thank you!!

[Villanelle 4,121]

Im not sure if anyone will be able to give you an answer on this. You have to take into account the monitor you are using to view it vs theirs. It may look kinda blurry on yours and look fine to them or vice versa.  You wont know until you try to submit it and they actually look at it and determine if its OK. 

 

Compressing and shrinking is hard. You have to plan it well. Might be better to start from scratch rather then trying to rework what you have already.. There are many articles online about how to compress that you can follow to try to get it looking better. You can also try posting on Reddit in one of the various tech type help subreddits and Im sure someone there has the technical knowledge to walk you through what you need to do or let you know where you are going wrong. I would not send anyone your personal documents though to have them do it for you- too risky unless you know them personally or its a company you are paying to resize- which I dont know if that even exists but I assume they do.  

 

 

[otta 7]

I empathize; spent almost 2 weeks trying various scanners and dozens of setting combinations to try to get the best possible quality under 2MB; it was such a headache. It's a crapshoot and one just never knows. 

 

Did you try more than one scanner? We found that quality/size balance was worst from public scanners in places like Fedex Office and mostly had no luck trying to compress good quality larger files using Adobe Acrobat or online services. We did find a scanner at my office that worked well enough for the most part, and also at a professional photographer's office, that had good equipment. Depending where you are, it may not be easy to look for other scanners right now, but perhaps there's a different machine you could try.

 

Lastly, maybe try a smartphone scanner app? (One of NVC suggestions; maybe can allow you some more options to play with?) I've seen some stunning PDF scans from those.

 

Edited May 10, 2020 by otta
added link to NVC

[StaGor 26]

Just wanted to pitch in. I bought a ~$20 printer/scanner at Walmart which does really goods quality scan.

Before scanning you can chose quality to be 150 DPI which is exactly what NVC recommends, and files usually are pretty small size.

The quality indeed is not great, but no matter what scanner you have, 150 DPI will always give you very grainy/noisy, but quite readable documents, which I guess is what NVC wants.

 

[Alexsea 45]

Great! Thanks everyone. I will give this a try. I think some of our documents are fine (grainy, but fine), and others we might need to fiddle with some more. If they ask us during the interview what the most difficult part of this process was, I'm going to say compressing the files to fit under 2MB! 😂😂

[user555 196]

I use paintdotNET (free photo editing software) to reduce file size images down (if you save them as jpeg files, it gives you an estimate of how big it will be and you can reduce the quality before you finally save the photo). Also, I noticed that if I had some pictures in a Word document and I was a little bit over 2 MB, if I printed it to a pdf (using Foxit's free PDF printer), it would compress it to half the size. Also, I used PDFMate PDF converter (free) to export pages out of a pdf into pictures (I had to go into Advanced settings to export them as high quality). Then, if I had 8 pictures, I could modify the file size of each one, select them all, right click them and print to pdf using Foxit. Under 2 MB. 

Edited May 11, 2020 by user555