Accepted formats
Accepted file formats: PDF, and nothing else
A fax does not carry a file. It carries a black-and-white image, line by line. The format you upload determines one thing only: how faithful that image will be.
Short answer
The form accepts PDF only, up to 10 MB. Whatever the original format, a document is rasterised into a bitonal image before transmission anyway: a fax has no colour, no grey levels and no fonts. PDF is used because it is the only common format whose layout is fixed by the file itself, and therefore identical for the sender and at the receiving end.
Every format ends up rasterised
Transmission knows only a grid of dots, each one black or white. A word processor file, a spreadsheet or an image all pass through that same step, so accepting other formats would add no quality at all — only one more conversion outside the sender's control. A PDF, by contrast, arrives already fixed: fonts embedded, positions settled, page size defined.
What the conversion loses
Fonts disappear as fonts: only the drawing of their outlines remains, which is why sharp text beats a screenshot. Transparency is flattened onto white, layers are merged, colours and greys are cut at a threshold. A yellow highlight, a pale grey fill or a faint stamp swings either to white or to solid black, with nothing in between. Anything that carries meaning must therefore be legible in black and white before sending.
Exported or scanned: the same document, ten times the weight
An exported PDF stores text and vector shapes, in the order of a few tens of kilobytes per page. A scanned PDF stores a photograph of the sheet, often in colour or greyscale at a high resolution: several megabytes per page. The same visible content, an order of magnitude apart — the 10 MB limit is reached by the scan, almost never by the export. The scan is also the poorer source: it was already rasterised once, with its shadows, its skew and its paper grain, before being rasterised a second time for the fax.
Frequently asked questions
- Can a Word file or a photo be sent?
- No, the form does not accept them. Export the document to PDF from the software that produced it rather than photographing the screen or the sheet: an export keeps character edges sharp, which is precisely what survives the conversion to black and white.
- What if the PDF is larger than 10 MB?
- Re-export it in black and white, or rescan in monochrome rather than colour: beyond the transmission resolution, a fax gains nothing. Splitting the document is the last resort, since each part counts as a separate send against the allowance of two faxes per day.
Send a fax now
The form fits on one page: a PDF, a recipient and a return address. No account, no card.
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