Because 5 MB leaves room, the result can be sharper than the Balanced card: the top of the ladder keeps images at 220 DPI, and colour is only given up on the last three rungs, when nothing in colour fits. If the chosen setting comes in under 4 MB — more than a fifth of the limit unused — Bindery tries a setting halfway towards the next sharper rung and keeps it if it still fits. Only raster images — photographs, screenshots, scanned pages — are resampled, brought down to what a full slide or page needs at that setting; text, vector charts and shapes are never rasterised, and scanned pages get a sharp 1-bit text mask over a low-resolution background that keeps any OCR layer. If even 50 DPI in grayscale stays above 5 MB, Bindery shows the smallest size it reached and whether the pictures or the text and structure are to blame, and offers to split that version into parts under 5 MB — a page that alone exceeds 5 MB becomes its own part, flagged.
How it works
- Drop the deck, brochure or scan — Compress opens with 5 MB entered and starts measuring
- Read the Exact size card: the real size and the setting it chose, or why 5 MB is out of reach
- Download and check photos at 200% zoom — or split the smallest version into parts sized to 5 MB
Questions people ask
Will a slide deck come out sharper than the Balanced level?
It can. The ladder starts above Balanced — its top setting keeps images at 220 DPI with high JPEG quality — and the search keeps the sharpest setting whose written file is at or under 5 MB, so a deck that fits up there is not pushed down to Balanced’s 150 DPI for nothing. The card names what it settled on, such as “images at 120 DPI, quality 58”. Vector charts, shapes and text are not images and stay exactly as they were.
Does Bindery count 5 MB as 5,000,000 bytes or 5,242,880?
5,000,000 — the smaller of the two, so a file that fits it is also under a 5 MB limit that counts a megabyte as 1,048,576 bytes. 5 MB is not one of the quick chips under the size box; to set it yourself, type 5 — a bare number of 50 or below is read as megabytes — and “Save these settings as my default” keeps the limit for next time.
Can the free plan take a deck export larger than 25 MB?
No — free files go up to 25 MB, so a bigger export needs Pro, which has no file caps. Under that, the search costs nothing: the level cards and the fit are measured before the job and do not use one of your three daily jobs. Free PDFs carry a small “Made with Bindery” line at the foot of each page; it is added before the final size check, and if it tips the file over 5 MB the search runs again with less room.