Scholarship Documents: Scanning, Formats and File Sizes Done Right

A flatbed scanner gives the most consistent result: flat pages, even lighting and no shadows. Many photocopy shops and cyber cafes offer scanning for a small fee. If you scan yourself, a resolution of around 200 to 300 DPI is usually enough to keep small print readable while keeping file sizes manageable.

A phone camera can work well if you are careful. Lay the document on a plain, dark surface in daylight near a window, hold the phone directly above it so the edges run parallel to the frame, and avoid flash, which causes glare on laminated certificates. A scanning app that detects edges and corrects perspective helps, but switch off heavy filters that bleach out stamps and signatures. Before you move on, check each capture against this list.

• All four corners of the page are visible
• No fingers, shadows or background objects in the frame
• Text, seals and signatures stay sharp when you zoom in
• The page is upright and not mirrored
• Coloured stamps and seals keep their colour

Scholarship portals expect a recent passport-style photograph with a plain white background. ICCR specifically asks for both ears to be visible, which rules out photos where hair covers the sides of the face. A studio photo is the safest option, but a well-lit phone photo against a white wall can work if the background is genuinely white rather than grey or cream.

Some portals also set exact pixel dimensions and a KB range for the photo. The COMPEX portal is a good example, which is why our COMPEX Document Prep tool at /tools/compex-documents is built around its photo specification. For other portals, the Image Resizer at /tools/image-resizer lets you crop to the right proportions and bring the file into the required KB range.

Tip: Do not reuse an old photo from your citizenship card or a social media profile. Reviewers compare your photo with your passport, and an outdated or edited picture raises unnecessary questions.

Sign on clean, plain white paper using a black or dark blue pen, with the same signature you used on your passport or citizenship certificate. Leave some white space around it, then crop closely so the signature fills most of the image. Faint pencil and very thin gel pens often fade into nothing after compression.

Make sure the background stays white after scanning or photographing. A yellowish or shadowed background looks careless and can fail automated checks on some portals. Raising the contrast slightly before resizing usually fixes this without distorting the signature itself.

As a general rule, portals take the photograph and signature as JPG images, while certificates, mark sheets, translations and passport pages go in as PDFs. The ICCR A2A portal shows how both can apply to one document: the passport front page is used as a JPG during registration, while the document section expects the front and back merged into one PDF.

If you have certificates saved as images, convert them with /tools/jpg-to-pdf, which can also combine several images into a single PDF. If a portal asks for an image but you only have a PDF, for example a photo that a shop scanned and saved as PDF, use /tools/pdf-to-jpg to extract the page as a JPG. Never change a file's type by simply renaming its extension, because the portal reads the actual file and will reject it or show it as corrupt.

Every upload slot has a maximum size, and some also have a minimum. A file over the limit is rejected immediately, but the bigger danger is over-compression: a file that uploads without complaint yet turns small marks and seals into a blur. A reviewer who cannot read a document is unlikely to give you the benefit of the doubt.

Work in this order and you will rarely have trouble. If a PDF is still too large at the end, the usual cause is a very high-resolution colour scan of a plain text page, and rescanning at a moderate setting or in greyscale works better than compressing the same file again and again.

1. Scan or photograph at good quality
2. Crop away blank margins and background
3. Convert or merge into the format the slot requires
4. Compress with /tools/pdf-compressor or /tools/image-resizer until safely under the limit
5. Open the final file and zoom in to confirm it is still readable

Passports, Nepali citizenship certificates and some mark sheets carry information on both sides or across several pages. Uploading only the front leaves out details the reviewer may need, and uploading two files into a slot that accepts one simply fails. The answer is a single PDF with pages in natural order: front then back, page one then page two.

Use /tools/merge-pdf to combine the pages, arranging them in the correct order before merging. Afterwards, check the page count and orientation, because a sideways page is surprisingly common when the images came from a phone held at different angles.

Tip: For a translated document, a clear order is the original first, then its English translation, unless the portal provides separate slots for each.

Any document not originally in English, such as a Nepali citizenship certificate, needs an English translation. In Nepal these translations are commonly prepared and certified through a notary public, and the Embassy schemes that take paper applications explicitly ask for notarised translations. Our documents page shows a sample of an English translation format so you know what a complete one looks like.

Check that the translation spells your name, your parents' names and your date of birth exactly as on your passport. Converting a date of birth from the Bikram Sambat calendar to the Gregorian calendar is a classic source of mismatch, so verify the converted date against your passport before the notary stamps the translation.

Name every file descriptively before uploading, such as firstname-lastname-class12-marksheet.pdf. Clear names prevent the common slip of putting the Class 10 file into the Class 12 slot, and they make your folder easy to reuse for the next application or for post-selection paperwork. Keep your original high-quality scans in a separate folder and back everything up to cloud storage or a USB drive.

Our document tools run entirely in your browser, so files are processed on your own device rather than uploaded to a server. Whatever tools you use, watch for these errors that regularly cause uploads to fail or be queried.

• Uploading a screenshot of a PDF instead of the document itself
• Password-protected PDFs that the portal cannot open
• Pages with mixed orientation inside one PDF
• Photos with grey, patterned or shadowed backgrounds
• Only the first page of a multi-page mark sheet included