PDF transfer

How it works

A digitally born PDF is already compressed. Zipping it saves little. A scan-heavy PDF can be hundreds of megabytes and fails the attachment limit the same way a video does. Transfer in binary or as an HTTP body. ASCII mode on FTP corrupts it. The recipient checks page count and a hash, not only that a viewer opened.

Counsel sends a 60 MB scanned agreement. Mail bounces at the gateway. An expiring link delivers 60,214,883 bytes. The recipient's hash matches. A later resend through a scanner that rewrote the PDF fails the hash even though the page count matches. They keep the first copy.

How it differs

A PDF transfer is not a document-collaboration session. Comments in a shared viewer are a different object. The transferred file is the frozen bytes.

Gateways strip or wrap PDFs and change the hash. Publish the hash of the file you uploaded, and say so in the mail.

Linearized PDFs open the first page before the download finishes. A complete legal copy still needs the full byte count.

On the ticket

• The practical close is a log line: time, actor, byte count, result.
• Without that line the transfer is a story.
• With it, the next person can see whether this door did what the ticket claimed.
• If the path is shared, say so in the partner profile so a later change does not silently pick a different limit, key, or region.