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I'm struggling a bit with properly exporting documents to PDF in Publisher. Situation is: I've created a calendar A3/300dpi with - of course - HiRes pictures for each page. This results in a PDF size for print of 500MB - fair enough. Now I'd like to generate a pdf as a web preview that preferably would have 1200px width with good quality pictures and a small footprint (less than 4MB filesize). But I can't find any setting that will allow proper resizing for the required output size - maintainig picture quality in smaller size. Of course I can reduce my dpi but this eventually results in extremely bad graphic quality. Seems like the only way is to print it to a pdf printer driver and change setting in the driver - sadly this brings other problems that are not acceptable. is this really the only way to get a smaller pdf size or is it just me that has not figured out how to do it properly?

Cheers, Timo

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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@Gary: Yes, I've tried JPG output and that works fine in all required formats - but I want it as one PDF Document
@Lagarto: I tried printing to printer driver but discovered many problems with that. E.g. rotated pics get mirrored in the output :-( (Using the FoxIt driver as well as the Microsoft driver)
I'd like to have a 1200px in 100% pdf size. Using 300dpi that would result in 4inch document size - So I'm actually looking for a proper resize of the pdf document. Such a document should be perfect when viewed in 100% and of quite small size.

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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1) Document Setup -> change mm to px

2) Spread Setup -> Change spread to 1200px width (locked) + Rescale

3) Export Web-PDF with 300dpi

perhaps?

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Windows 10 | i5-8500 CPU | Intel UHD 630 Graphics | 32 GB RAM | Latest Retail and Beta versions of complete Affinity range installed

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One way to look at it could be that you might not want the web preview to be particularly good quality.
If the web preview was good quality then people could just use that instead of buying(?) the real thing.
You could give a low quality preview (maybe add a watermark too) with some small-but-good-quality ‘snippets’ to show what the real thing will look like.

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Joachim: I'm sure that works but it means I've got to change the layout for my complete document (and set it back to original resolution afterwards again) ... seems to be a questionable workaround :-(

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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Gary, that's one (of many reasons) I want to reduce resolution down to 1200px screen resolution. Still good viewing quality but not enough to reproduce. Another reason is the file size since it needs to be distributed via email.

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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That's true ... I don't have Acrobat Pro on my system - so need another way to realise this task. Maybe it's  a sensible feature request for Publisher to have a scaling in the PDF output Options available?!

It's even easier to use an online JPG to PDF converter to transform all single JPGs into one pdf ... I was just hoping to use Publisher as the native App for the task.

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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Just one example for the problems:

test.jpg is a proper export out of publisher as JPG

1313298217_test_exportjpg.thumb.jpg.e2f5e0b74866ff667204087c28bb30bf.jpg

test_org.pdf is the exported file in Web format out of publisher (crappy quality)

test_org.pdf

test_foxIt printer shows the mirrored file out of the printer driver (same with microsoft pdf printer) - if the graphic is not rotated it works fine.

test_FoxIt printer.pdf

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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The test_org.pdf is only 3.47in x 2.25in (approx. business card) in size so I wouldn’t expect much quality from that if you are squashing down from A3. (I would expect better though so maybe it's a DPI issue or something like that.)
The test_FoxIt printer.pdf is 11.69in x 8.27in in size so that’s not really a good comparison.

Edited by GarryP
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Well, the FoxIt example only shows the mirrored image problem.

And of course quality gets better, when increasing the dpi. The problem from my perspective is that PDF defines "Original Size" on the base of the document settings. When I'm looking for a pdf for the web I'd like "Original Size" to just be based on the pixel not on pixel-per-inch. Meaning I want my exported pdf size to be based on screen resolution. Resizing to 1200px for example would result in "Original size" of 1pixel of my pdf is the equivalent to 1 screen pixel (in that case the dpi is defined by my screen resolution and not by the real document resolution) - as it's done with jpgs (that have no document size) - frankly spoken, I'm not sure if the pdf format is capable of that in general.

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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3 hours ago, DarkClown said:

I'd like to generate a pdf as a web preview that preferably would have 1200px width with good quality pictures and a small footprint (less than 4MB filesize). But I can't find any setting that will allow proper resizing for the required output size - maintainig picture quality in smaller size. Of course I can reduce my dpi but this eventually results in extremely bad graphic quality.

For such a web-pdf I would ignore page dimension and care for pixel dimensions only.
Simply export a PDF with an output resolution that results in the wanted pixel dimensions for your A3 page. For instance:

A3 @ 300 dpi = 42 cm = 4960 px 

x dpi / 1200 px = 300 dpi / 4960 px

x = 1200 x 300 / 4960
= 72.6 dpi

If you prefer 1200 px page width then all graphic must get reduced its resolution of cause (which might appear as less quality, even if it is not)

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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I completely agree with you .... that's what I tried to do! But Output quality in that case is really crappy and file size still far to high ...

Here is an example (as Thomaso mentioned correctly - with 72dpi)
Top is the jpg with 1200px jpg
Bottom is the pdf with 72 dpi

Just compare the quality of the text ("Semiconductor" and "Timo Bierbaum Photography")- and the jpg size is 340KB - pdf size is more than 5MB!

FoxitReader_ir161lsqDG.thumb.png.eff76c19dd5f3067bb5c92ed17d70537.png

Aside that the pdf-size (in the pic) to have it equivalent sized than the jpg (that is on 100%) is only 76% ... but also looking at it on 100% it looks crappy ...

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 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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@Lagarto: The document is a 13page calendar for print. But to advertise and promote it I need a preview in good quality (just a significant smaller resolution that it can't be used for print and a significant smaller filesize to be able to email it or have people download it)

CRM.png.a048d588572393102ac3cc403bfa8af7.png

 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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1 hour ago, DarkClown said:

Here is an example (as Thomaso mentioned correctly - with 72dpi)
Top is the jpg with 1200px jpg
Bottom is the pdf with 72 dpi

Just compare the quality of the text ("Semiconductor" and "Timo Bierbaum Photography")- and the jpg size is 340KB - pdf size is more than 5MB!

I can not confirm your experience but get different + better results. I assume you haven't used same settings for jpg vs. pdf. (For instance color space, downsampling from x, compression rate ...) To keep pdf size small do not embed profiles.

Here are my settings for an A4 page (102 dpi –> 1200 px):

195878879_1200pxPDFsetting.jpg.21226e26ad017a0fbe429dcc34c26a8c.jpg     757557678_1200pxJPGsetting.jpg.7b2c685318515c4fa36d8aa9183d8081.jpg

... and the image results (left: PDF / right: JPG)

997351298_1200pxcompare.thumb.jpg.87ca00fd85cd539536d5d2ec8b891c44.jpg
 

631372022_1200pxfilesizes.jpg.be611ce8c8ab20a52383017b113bf0e1.jpg

The PDF is slightly smaller because of little different dimensions: Though I calculated 102 dpi for an A4 page it came out with 1139 px instead 1200.

 

macOS 10.14.6 | MacBookPro Retina 15" | Eizo 27" | Affinity V1

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It's getting a bit weired now ...

I checked my settings again. My jpg compression was the same for jpg and pdf (85%).
What surely caused a problem was the setting "Convert Image color spaces" ... checking this causes additional 4.3 MB to the file size. (I thought it would reduce size)

Embedding the ICC profile is insignificant, same with embedding fonts ...

Strangely enough 100% in 72dpi is still 1/3 larger than the original 1200px jpg file but still really bad quality (bottom logo is 100% pdf - top is 100%jpg). And increasing the dpi will (of course improve quality but also) increase document dimensions in 100% view.

So I got pfd size down to 680kb now - vs 330kb in JPG

FoxitReader_mUF0n8dPFf.png.0d11e8a467e1ebe52e6ce36c5724f7da.png

CRM.png.a048d588572393102ac3cc403bfa8af7.png

 i7-12700KF, 3.60 GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070, Wacom Intuos 4 Tablet, Windows 11 Pro - AP, AD and APublisher V1 and V2
https://www.timobierbaum.com

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