I really like the 'idea' of Publisher... but everything I've tried with it so far had me return to the latest/last PagePlus.

[Alchemist42]

I'm a long time fan of Page Plus and have used it on dozens of projects.  I also work with InDesign / IDML in my development work...    I've been looking forward to Publisher for a while so snapped it up upon release.   But so far everything I've started on it... I've ended up stuck...   

Lets take a simple PDF cleanup...  I had a PDF that someone tacked on a cover page using some software so it was several times larger than the other pages... so I just wanted to load the PDF, fix that page size and save it again.   In Publisher I loaded the 32mb document... couldn't find a setting in page properties for the first page to reset it to letter... so ended up duplicating page 2,  copying and resizing the page 1 image on the new page... then deleting the original page.  Clumsy but it works...   Then I saved the document as a publisher file... 320mb. (10 times the size of the original PDF) then I exported it to a PDF and the result was a 400mb PDF file.    32mb to 400mb.

Next I did the same thing in PagePlus…   loaded the document, went to the page properties on page one and reset it to 'letter' 8.5x11...  resized the image and saved the exported the document to PDF... it resulted in a 40mb PDF file...   still bigger but not excessively larger.  

Next I experimented with recreating a project I had been working on in PagePlus since Publisher can't and wont load Page Plus Documents...  that project uses some of the pageplus smart objects as 'counters'...  but all the smart objects in Publisher start at 3 or more sides... so useless as a count indicator...  so that project will have to stay in page plus.   

So pretty much...  while I think publisher looks really cool and I hope to see great things from it... for me, at least so far its the equivalent of a lawn ornament...   that really great looking muscle car that sits in front of your house because it doesn't run.     

[Distill7]

To edit the size of 1 page: While the "move tool" is selected, click on "Spread Setup..." on the toolbar, then select "Current Spread" or "Selected Spreads" and adjust the size as you want. In the scaling tab, you can control the behaviour of the scaling. You should ask if something can be done first before complaining that it doesn't.

To control the size of the exported PDF, On the export panel, click on "More..." Then you want to Enable Downsample images above 300 DPI, and Allow JPEG compression.

Put in mind that Pubilsher is not and never meant to be a PDF editor, at exporting, it'll reprocess all of the PDF's text and images, modified or not. A PDF editor, like acrobat, will change only the modified pages/images/text and will leave everything else intact. That's the type of software you should use for this type of tasks.

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