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In making a book of photographs to be printed by a print-on-demand company, I found I'd exceeded their 300 MB per PDF limit even before I had all image files placed in the Publisher document. The idea of further JPEG compression was not appealing but I decided (holding my nose the entire time) to try compression settings during export to PDF. The results surprised me. No compression: 388.5 MB No compression (2nd time around): 363.4 MB (why the difference?) Compression setting 100: 211 MB Compression setting 99: 182.7 MB Compression setting 97: 139 MB Compression setting 95: 114 MB Compression setting 90: 83 MB I take it this means that the max quality setting (100) still involves re-compression of the images. All along I'd thought 100 means: no compression. Apparently not. So if output file sizes are plaguing you, perhaps the slight JPEG compression will be helpful. Before starting the tests I ran the original JPEGs through the compression program JPEG-Mini. It made a whopping difference in the files' sizes and without noticeable loss of quality. But using the JPEGs compressed with JPEG-Mini as source files within the Publisher document doesn't seem to have provided a lot of savings during export to PDF. Perhaps JPEG-Mini's major advantage is a "web thing" and not a "print thing".

I did a first-time test of the make-collection feature and got quite the surprise. I made a temporary directory of the hard drive. With a small Publisher document open, I selected Document > Resource Manager, selected all image files shown there, and clicked Collect. For the destination I selected the temporary directory and then the collection was made. After checking to ensure that all files appeared in the temporary Collect directory, I removed it. At that moment Publisher announced a loss of linkage to all of the image files in the document. It appears the program had just re-linked all images to the versions that were copied to the Collect subdirectory. (Had I missed an option that specifies: only copy them — don't re-link them?) Then I had to re-link all of them manually to their original location. I'm glad it's a small document. If I had to do that in the document once it's finished, I'd be at it all day as there does not appear to be a way of doing it in a batch (which would make sense if the missing image files were all in the same directory—which, in this case, they were). Restoring the links seems to be a one-file-at-a-time operation. As far as I can tell, Publisher's online help file (the topic on making a collection from the Resource Manager) does not mention the change of linkage in this situation. Is the feature working as designed? The "gotcha" of suddenly changed linkages could be a nasty surprise indeed for the unwary with a large document containing image files residing, originally, in multiple locations.