Uploading PDF Documents

Overview

Gnosis provides a few options for uploading documents into the system:

• Attaching PDFs to a contact management record
• Uploading PDFs, Word, or Excel documents into a person's document library
• Uploading PDFs for sharing in Support Groups
• Uploading PDFs (or other files) in Communications for use as attachments

In each of these scenarios, it is useful to review the document sizes to ensure that you are not needlessly wasting space in your database system.

Document Size Management

PDF document uploads must generally be less than 5 megabytes in size.  If you need to upload a larger document for sharing, another option would be to upload the document to an Online File storage location (Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive, DropBox, Box.com, or others)

When uploading larger PDFs to Gnosis, an error message can sometimes appear, or you may get a message warning about document size.  In these situations, you may want to try  Compressing the PDF file before uploading it.

Depending on the source of your PDF, you may use the following guidelines.

Scanning to PDFs

To minimize a scanned PDF document size, follow these guidelines:

• Scan in Greyscale, not color when the document is for record archival purposes)
• For scan quality, choose 200dpi or less

If the document is still too large after using these settings, you can compress the document to remove much of its size without losing any perceivable quality (see Print to PDFs below)

Print to PDF's

For PDFs that you have created via Windows Print-to-PDF options, you may need to compress the document before uploading.  Here are some options:

• The PDF software that you use may have a compress option.  Use Compress - High.  If you do not have any PDF software, we recommend PDF Element - inexpensive and very full-featured - including inbuilt compression and document conversions.
• If you have a free Adobe account, you can use Adobe's free online PDF compressor at https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/online/compress-pdf.html

Uploading for Communications Attachments

When uploading for attachment purposes in the Communications module, using the inbuilt upload button is subject to the same 5 MB upload size.  For larger documents, you may use the media storage area in your Gnosis Web Portal CMS system or other locations suggested above in Document Size Management.