Business Services Office, Student Life & Leadership, UC Irvine

How to Prepare PDFs for KFS

Section 1

FILE SIZE ISSUE SUMMARY

As of the time of this writing, 5/12/2022, KFS has a maximum file size limit of 5 MB.  For most administrative receipt scans and text-based documents, this is sufficient; however, SLL marketing tends to include high-resolution promotional materials which often approach or exceed this limit.  Furthermore, DocuSign is often used to distribute and route forms for authorization and adds security settings to PDF to make them difficult to edit once signed.  DocuSign can handle large file sizes, but KFS cannot...

Therefore, it is important to prepare your documents for the process BEFORE routing them via DocuSign to avoid having to try to fix them after the fact.

HOW TO PREPARE PDFs FOR ROUTING AND KFS UPLOAD

Since the authorization and documentation process does not require print-quality documents, make sure any publicity/marketing documents are reduced to minimal resolutions before routing or submitting to BSO or KFS (72 - 100 dpi images).  True "text" takes very little space compared to images.  Images can be reduced in resolution (dot density), color depth (number of colors), and compressed (algorithmically reduced) even after high-quality versions have been created.

  1. Open PDF in Adobe Acrobat DC (Pro version, not Reader version)
  2. Choose File > Save As...
  3. Choose location on your computer to save
  4. On screen where you can change name and file format, do both...
    1. NAME : add "_reduced" suffix to name, e.g. filename_reduced.pdf
    2. FORMAT : Adobe PDF, Optimized
    3. After selecting "Adobe PDF, Optimized", press the "Settings" button next to the file format dropdown
      1. MAKE COMPATIBLE WITH : Acrobat 5.0 and later
      2. Verify color and gray images downsample to 96 ppi for images above 144 ppi.
      3. Verify monochrome images downsample to 600 dpi for images above 900 ppi.

Using these settings, our sample 11x17 poster went from 84 MB to 737 KB (less than 1 MB).  This can be applied to your entire multi-page packet before uploading into DocuSign for maximum effect, but if you manually add individual documents to DocuSign, you should at least do this for your marketing documents before uploading.

HOW TO MERGE MULTIPLE PAGES INTO A SINGLE PDF BEFORE REDUCING OR UPLOADING INTO DOCUSIGN

  1. Open PDF in Adobe Acrobat DC (Pro version, not Reader version)
  2. Click on "Tools" tab
  3. Select "Combine Files" option
  4. Use either the "Add Files" or "Add Open Files" option to add other PDFs to the current document.