And another PDF question...

[ffutures]

Okay, on the last lap I think.

Still trying to get the size down, I know that a lot of it is because there are a load of illustrations. Most of them started up as BIG images, and were resized when I pasted them into the original Word document.

I've been assuming that this works like saving a print file - the final file size in the PDF is based solely on the area of the picture and the resolution of the PDF, and not the picture's actual original size, so that if (for example) I used the same picture at two points, one full size and the other at half size, the size added to the file will be much less for the smaller version.

If I'm wrong then I suppose I have to resample all of the pictures to their final size before converting it to the PDF, which will be a lot of work. Does anyone know for sure how this is supposed to work?

Later: Tried Adobe's "free file conversion" thing. It wouldn't even start to upload the file, let alone let me enter the parameters. I suspect that they are expecting dainty little things, not a complete book!

Comments

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

What settings are you using when you create your PDF? It doesn't sound like you're using any compression or cropping.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

I'm using all of the compression settings they said for graphics, mainly downsampling of images to 150 ppi and compression to jpeg. There's no info on cropping at all.

It really does sound like I need to get hold of Distiller.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Even though I promised myself I wouldn't, I've spent some time trying to figure out what your problem is.

If you export all the images out of the file, except for the cover they're all pretty much the original size. That is, very, very big. I got it down to 18.6 MB, but 18MB of that is the pictures. Using Acrobat Professional didn't seem to do anything to them at all.

So if you resize the images using Photoshop or similar then you'll be OK. The cell phone pic is almost 500k, frex, and much much larger than how you use it in your doc.

If you had Word XP or later that program would resize the images for you, and again you'd be OK. If you had Adobe InDesign, that would also resize the pics for you when you exported them to Acrobat.

I'm not sure that buying Acrobat Standard or Professional will help you, and I don't have enough of the old software you're using to test it.

The cheap (except for your time) way would be to resize each image. The quick (but not cheap) way would be to get a new program: Word XP or 2003 would do what you want, but a combination of InDesign and Acrobat Professional would too.

FWIW, the print-optimized version of Diana (which excludes the cover), created using InDesign and Acrobat was 30MB.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks - someone has offered to run it through Distiller for me, if that doesn't work I'll resample the pictures first.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

In fact I'm resampling the pictures anyway - it seems to have a big impact, I've shed 4 mb just by resampling the cover and illos from the first fifth of the book, should be a lot more by the time I'm done.