200KB is a budget divided, not a size
The useful way to think about a multi-page cap is per page. At 200KB, four pages get 50KB each and ten pages get 20KB each — and those are very different documents. This is why two people with the same limit and the same tool get wildly different results: one is submitting a two-page form and the other a ten-page application pack.
It also means the most effective thing you can do has nothing to do with compression settings. Removing pages nobody needs to read — blank reverse sides, cover sheets, duplicated annexures — hands the remaining pages a larger share of the budget, and that improves the result more than any setting can.
Not all pages cost the same
Encoding cost tracks how much detail a page contains, not how important it is. A page of double-spaced typed text is cheap. A page with a photograph, a dense table, a signature block or handwriting is expensive, sometimes by a factor of five. A document is therefore only as compressible as its busiest pages.
Physical page size matters too, and catches people out. Cost scales with area, so an A3 drawing scanned into an otherwise A4 document consumes roughly twice what an A4 page does. Where a portal permits it, submitting oversized pages as a separate file leaves far more budget for the pages being read.
Handwriting deserves a specific mention, because it is far more expensive than people expect. Typed text is highly repetitive — the same few dozen letterforms, cleanly printed, over and over — and that regularity compresses well. Handwriting is different every time, its strokes vary in weight and darkness, and the pen often bleeds slightly into the paper, so a handwritten page can cost several times what the same page of typed text would.
Merging and splitting around the limit
People often merge everything into one PDF because it feels tidier, then discover the combined file exceeds the cap. If the limit is per file and the portal accepts several uploads, the tidier choice is the wrong one — separate files each get their own budget.
Where a single file is mandatory, order the work correctly: remove unnecessary pages first, then merge, then compress once at the end. Compressing the parts and then merging means every page has been through a lossy pass before the final one, and the damage compounds for no benefit.
Reading the DPI figure the result gives you
Alongside the file size, the result reports the resolution it settled on, and that number predicts readability far better than the size does. Around 150 DPI a scanned page is comfortable to read on screen and prints acceptably. At 100 DPI body text is fine while footnotes and small print become marginal. Below roughly 72 DPI a person can recognise the document but not comfortably read it.
If the reported figure has dropped low, that is the tool telling you the document is too heavy for the budget rather than telling you it did a poor job. The remedies are all upstream: fewer pages, a cleaner scan, greyscale instead of colour, or splitting the submission. Reaching for a different setting will not recover what the page count spent.