Checked against the current Windows build. Where an article names a menu, a button or a message, that is the wording in the application, not a paraphrase.
One command answers four of them
creasepoint info statement.pdf prints the full path of the file it actually read, its size, its page count, whether it is encrypted, and then the first five pages with their dimensions in points and how many objects each carries. Pages it could not describe are counted separately. That is four of the things an upload page checks, on one screen, before you change anything.
Points are seventy-seconds of an inch, so the numbers convert on sight once you know two of them. A4 is 595 by 842. US Letter is 612 by 792, which is what a document drafted on a machine set to a US locale comes out at, and it is close enough to A4 to pass a human reading and fail a validator. A portal asking for A4 is asking about those first two numbers.
Page count and page size are the two the message rarely names
Many portals cap the number of pages as well as the megabytes, and some require A4 specifically. Creasepoint has no scale-to-A4 tool, and saying so is more useful than letting you hunt for one: rotation, cropping and page insertion are all there, resizing is not.
For the page count, Extract pages, or creasepoint extract file.pdf --pages 1,3,5-7 --out out.pdf, gives you a document of the pages that were asked for. For the page size there is one route and it costs you something. Export as images writes one PNG per page at 96, 150 or 300 DPI, and Images to PDF then lays each image on an A4 portrait page with about a ten-millimetre margin, unless you tick the box that makes the page match the image instead. What comes back is pictures of pages. Text that was selectable is now pixels, and only OCR brings search back. Reasonable for a scan, wasteful for anything born digital.
Colour is the third of these and there is nothing to be done about it here. No tool in Creasepoint reports a page's colour mode or converts one; if the notice asks for greyscale, that is a scanner setting.
Encryption and signatures get refused without being mentioned
If info answers the encryption line with yes and a security handler revision, act on that before anything else: plenty of portals refuse an encrypted attachment outright and report it as a file error. On the Secure tab, the tool headed Remove password writes a copy without the encryption, and creasepoint unlock file.pdf --password --out open.pdf does the same from a script. Both need the correct password. Neither recovers a forgotten one, and no feature here ever will.
A signature is the opposite problem. Some filing portals want one and refuse a file without it; others reject a signed file because their own process adds the signature afterwards. When the open document carries a signature the window says so in a banner above the pages, and the command line reports the signature state of everything it read. Signing with a DSC token covers which field to sign and why the name of it matters.
One cause of rejection worth naming, because nothing on screen will: the key type. Creasepoint signs with RSA or ECDSA, and for an Indian filing you want RSA. Indian DSC tokens are RSA in practice, and the signature profile India’s rules point at names RSA and no alternative — so an ECDSA signature that every reader calls valid could still be refused by a portal, and the message you get back will not say so. creasepoint certs prints the key type of everything it can sign with.
Filenames, and the failures that have nothing to do with the file
Rename before you re-upload. A space, an ampersand, a hash, a comma, a full stop in the middle, a name in a non-Latin script, or a name long enough to hit a path limit will each defeat some upload handler somewhere, and what comes back is generic. Letters, digits, hyphens and one full stop before the extension is a name nothing argues with.
Then the ones that are not about the file at all. The page has been open long enough for the session to expire while you were compressing, so the form posts to a login screen and reports a failed upload. The document went into the box above the one it belonged in. Or the file picker is pointed at the original rather than the compressed copy beside it under a similar name — Show in folder, on the Share menu, tells you which file you are actually holding.
Change one thing, then try again
Keep the file the portal was given and work on copies with names that record what changed: cert-300kb.pdf, then cert-300kb-a4.pdf, then cert-300kb-a4-open.pdf. When a portal gives the same message for six different causes, a run of attempts that each changed two things tells you nothing at the end of it.
If it still fails with all of that checked, the notice is the authority and this page is not. Read the current one rather than a coaching summary of it, including the file type, the band, the page limit and the naming rule. Portals change these between sessions and rarely announce it.
The two places worth looking next.
Read the matching guide if you want the reasoning rather than the fix, and check limitations before spending any longer on it — some of what people look for here is absent on purpose.