Publisher hits the buffers

[Eftee]

I am the editor of a retirement village 22 page monthly newsletter/magazine. I colaborate with others during compilation. I have allways used ppx9. I used publisher for my latest edition which produced a file size of 300 mb and a PDF of 30 mb. This compares with 12mb and 2mb respectively in ppx9. Our broadband speed is 2 mbps. This means that, although I came to like a lot of publishers features, it is impractical for our situation and therefore we will stay with ppx9. I thought this information might be of interest for anyone thinking of switching.

[William Overington]

I had a similar problem, though with a smaller document.

The answer for my situation was to export the PDF document for web rather than for print.

If you choose to try this, when exporting the PDF document there is an Export Settings dialogue panel. On that panel there is a selection box labelled 'Preset:'

From that selection box choose 'PDF (for web)' and then export the PDF document and have a look how big is the resulting file.

You refer to "our situation". It depends upon what is that situation as to whether this suggestion does or does not resolve the situation.

I hope that this helps.

William

 

[GarryP]

To add to what William has said above, Publisher has had a tendency to produce large AFPUB files (especially if you have embedded images) but you can probably reduce the size of the PDF depending on various things.
For instance, which DPI do you need and what have you got the document/export set to?
If your PDF is for on-screen reading then you don’t really need anything more than 144DPI (72DPI – export for web preset – is too low in my opinion). If you’re using 300DPI (or higher) you may find that the images are way too high-resolution for your needs and could be taking up a lot more space than is necessary.
As a quick test I inserted two medium-sized images into a single page document. Exporting with the Raster DPI set to 300DPI gave me a file size of 1.53MB while exporting with a DPI of 144 gave me a file of 410kB only (less than a third of the size).
There will be other ways to reduce your PDF size – e.g. compression ratio, etc. – but that’s probably the first thing to check.

[Eftee]

Thank you for your responses. To clarify 'our situation', our office prints the newsletter from a PDF. There are usually quite a few images to go with event reports. During compilation we use a shared Dropbox for afpub files which means long uploading, synchronizing and downloading times for large files owing to our slow broadband speed. The cap on email attachments is 25 mb.

BTW. One of pubs features I really like is the scrolling of spreads up and down. I have only just discovered that this can also be done in ppx9.

[GarryP]

You’re welcome.

Ah I see, sorry, I missed the collaboration element.
Passing a 300MB file around won’t be a nice experience on a slow connection.
This video might be of some use: https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/tutorials/photo/desktop/video/333760172
It’s about using Photo to reduce image file sizes but the same sorts of things can be done easily with GIMP (it’s free so no extra costs for the group) if you don’t have Photo.

Another thing you could do is to use pixelated JPG placeholders until you’re ready to publish. Pixelated JPGs can be way smaller than the originals while still giving you a pretty good idea of what the image is supposed to be.
My example below shows the original image on the right at 848kB, and the pixelated version on the left at just 72kB (less than a tenth of the original).
Just remember to replace the pixelated version with the original before you publish (since the files are the same size, pixels-wise, Publisher should be able to replace without any layout being changed).