A4 to A5?

[ksrcreative]

I've just produced a charity magazine in Publisher and being from a print background I did it in A4. The problem is, it's not going to be printed, I'm selling it from my web site as a download only, to read on iPads or home computers. The issue is it's to big, 96 pages, to download from my site without going through some major backend changes. So, what i thought was, wouldn't it be great if I could just resize everything from A4 to A5... you can see I'm grasping at straws here.

Is there a way of converting the entire document from A4 to A5 at the push of a button?

 

Help ...please...

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[ksrcreative]

34 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

This kind of a job could easily be done using Adobe Acrobat Pro by "push of a button", and it would most probably work well for size reduction. I just tested this with a 52-page magazine and the size was reduced to appr. one third of the original using similar settings.

But doing this with Affinity tools is more difficult as there would most probably be scaling problems.

EDIT: If you can deliver this publically and do not have Acrobat Pro, I can do the conversion for you, if you wish...

That would be very kind Lagarto. Let me have a tinker first and see if I can get the size down. Regards K

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[thomaso]

3 hours ago, ksrcreative said:

it's not going to be printed, I'm selling it from my web site as a download only, to read on iPads or home computers. The issue is it's to big, 96 pages, to download

If it's for screen view only there is no need to reduce page dimensions to achieve a smaller exported file size. (Reducing .afpub's page size will need to scale objects and can cause unexpected results, e.g. for stroke or effect width.)

Instead you simply can reduce the resolution (DPI) on export, and the compression quality, as Lagarto mentioned already. Also make sure to export in RGB (not CMYK as for print, since this creates an additional color channel). Also embedding color profiles may increase the PDF size on export, in particular if there are images with CMYK profiles, so it may result in a smaller PDF if you don't embed any but rather convert on export.

Depending on the content it also might reduce the exported PDF file size already if you save or export it once more in an external PDF viewing app, e.g. in macOS the Preview.app, since a PDF may contain elements related to the internal PDF structure which may be obsolete, in particular for screen view only.

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[Fixx]

One button solution would be to use Acrobat, some "PDF squeezer" app or online service. They can compress images more tightly. Publisher can also do this (and downsample images too in export), but quality may not be as good as with other tools.

Changing physical page size is not really the right way to make images smaller. On the other hand, redesign to smaller format *might* make it easier to read digitally, but that is another issue.

[ksrcreative]

Thank you all for your advice.

K

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[ksrcreative]

Thank you again, I'll give that a try.

 

Regards

K

[thomaso]

6 hours ago, Lagarto said:

11 hours ago, thomaso said:

(Reducing .afpub's page size will need to scale objects and can cause unexpected results, e.g. for stroke or effect width.)

This only happens if objects are handled object-wise (without knowledge of the intended attributes) but it should not happen when pages are scaled page-wise.

Indeed, strokes and effects seem to get scaled regardless of the scale setting of their individual objects. That's good to know, thanks!

But I experience now one property that still sticks in it's size when the .afpub gets scaled via spread property: Corner radius set to "absolute".

Here the result after document scale (A4 > A5), both objects looked the same before scaling. Since usually sizes are set absolute in an .afpub (as object dimensions, text size, stroke width) I wonder if this is a bug?

[thomaso]

15 hours ago, ksrcreative said:

Is there a way of converting the entire document from A4 to A5 at the push of a button?

It seems none has answered your question yet (but rather, for various good reasons, tried to prevent you from using this feature in this case). So, just to let you know:

Yes, there is an option to scale an entire .afpub with "1-click". It is in the "Spread Setup" the "Scaling" > "Rescale" option:

The wanted page size gets set in the "Dimensions" tab. Take care for the obviously auto-checked "Portrait" format in this tab (I wonder for what purpose it happens).
Note that this feature maintains your documents resolution, means if you reduce the page size the Placed DPI of images will increase accordingly.

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[Joachim_L]

I think the easiest way of shrinking is printing to a good PDF printer. Even the file size gets smaller.

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[thomaso]

2 hours ago, Lagarto said:

To compare, the same publication when using "Reduced FIle Size" feature with Acrobat 10 format

@ksrcreative, alternatively you could try the Acrobat option of "Optimize" a PDF. It's in the menu slightly below "Reduce File Size" and does influence not only resolution but various aspects which may blow up a PDF file size. As mentioned above concerning the PDF internal structure, which can be set in a handful sections each with about a dozen specific settings and selections.

I experienced quite often a reduction even without activating the "image" section. For instance these two attached PDFs were optimized this way and reduced in size from ~ 4 MB to 2.5 MB, without reducing images at all!

1 original.pdf

2 optimized without images.pdf

This sample PDF was a web download and was initially exported from ID CS2. I have tested an APub exported PDF only once but its size increased this way (4 MB > 6 MB) with same optimize settings. So I don't know if Affinity PDFs can get optimized this way at all, if not this speaks for Affinity. But nevertheless this Acrobat option allows detailed settings when it should resample images, too.

[thomaso]

23 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

basically if something is said to be absolute this seems to behave correctly? Does this effect involve rasterization or baking? Was the scaling done within Affinity document size or via PDF scaling?

This sample was APub internal only, no PDF involved. It only shows the result of the feature of .afpub document scaling via Spread Setup.

The point here is that even properties which explicitly have their option "Scale with object" not ticked (stroke, effect) in the layout do get scaled this way, which is actually the desired result when scaling an .afpub via this feature. And, as I said, almost all values get set as absolute. I know only placed resources which can get defined as relative size (relative to their original vs page size and dpi). But e.g. text size, object size or stroke width can't get set relative to any other items dimension but are defined absolute.

I think this feature is meant "by design" to maintain the visual object appearance, e.g. if one needs to change the page ratio, too, for instance from a portrait print brochure to a single page landscape web pdf. So it would not make sense (be not of any use or advantage) if in particular the object corner radius would differ and not get scaled accordingly like any other layout item. – Agree?

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[thomaso]

32 minutes ago, Lagarto said:

This feature is promising, but cannot be used reliably. I just applied it on the magazine that I had used in my tests, and it causes things like this:

The PDF it produced with default PDF (small size) was promising, 2,755 KB-- but worse than I could get at when using down to 100dpi downscaling using Adobe Acrobat Pro.

Your screenshot seems to show a PDF in Acrobat. Was also your .afpub initially an opened PDF? If not, can you upload the .afpub with this text?

Note I did not mention this option to use it for reducing PDF file size but only because the question was asked. It is not at all useful to reduce the file size for export.

[thomaso]

1 minute ago, Lagarto said:

I just tested this with the same magazine that I used in my previous tests, and the default "Mobile" settings produced a 4.2MB PDF, and custom with forced downsampling to 72ppi for anything above it (color and grayscale), and 300dpi for monochromes, with PDF 1.7 compatibility and it produced a 2,7MB file size (compared to 2.0MB I could create at 100 dpi at A5 format), so 200KB less than with "Reduce File Size" feature. I'd say that this is the recommended method if format change is wanted to be avoided.

Note this Acrobat "Optimize" feature can cause very different results depending a lot on the content of the PDF and its initially export settings, too. In my experience this "Optimize" feature is always try & error, sometimes very useful, sometimes not at all.

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[PaulEC]

Not to "knock" anyone who suggests using Acrobat/Pro to edit PDF files, that's fine if you already have it (in which case you probably already know what you can do with it), but it really isn't a viable solution if you have to get it for a one off problem. (A years subscription costs more than buying the three Affinity apps outright!)

There are other solutions out there. For example PDF 24 (free) has a reduce file size option. On the default setting I reduced thomaso's 4.07 MB PDF to 2.88 MB and it is possible to make it smaller by playing with the compression settings. It looks just as good to me as using Acrobat. Some people may disagree about the quality or ease of use compared to Acrobat, but depending on your needs, free may well be preferred over the cost of Acrobat. 😉

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