How to keep a scanned signature readable under 20 KB

Start with your own authentic signature in dark ink on clean white paper. Use even indirect lighting. Keep the camera parallel to the paper, avoid hard shadows and crop excess blank margins.

Choose the exact pixel dimensions if the relevant recruitment notification states them. Otherwise use an appropriate aspect ratio and confirm the prescribed physical proportions. Save once with a controlled JPEG quality; repeated re-encoding softens narrow strokes.

For a 10–20 KB requirement, aim for the highest quality output at or below 20,000 bytes while staying above the minimum. A too-small or faint original cannot be reliably recovered by artificial sharpening. Rescan instead.