Approach to document design

X

XP

I am working on a family genealogy project in which I have 300+ old family
photographs that have been scanned and that I plan to organize into a single
document that will ultimately be published and hardbound. Each photo will be
accompanied by narrative information of varying lengths.

1) My planned approach is to insert a table on each page and adjust the
columns and rows of the table for the page layout desired. Insert the image
or images for that page into the appropriate table cells. Then add the
narratives into adjacent cells. Is this approach sound? Is there really a
better way?

2) My source images are rather large TIF’s (ranging from 20 to 90 mb each)
but I plan to use a copy of them converted to JPG for the MS-Word document to
conserve some memory. I am estimating this will be a 200 page document
consisting mostly of JPG’s. Will I run into any memory issues when dealing
with a document this big and with this many graphics and tables?

Any guidance or assistance is appreciated and welcomed. Thanks much in
advance for your assistance.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

You don't say whether you're planning to produce this document in-house
(printing it yourself) or send it to a commercial printer. Some of the
decisions will depend partly on that factor.

1. I would encourage use of a table as opposed to text boxes or frames.
Keeping graphics In Line With Text (as they will be in a table) is always
simpler and easier to handle.

2. If you're keeping the document in-house, I would strongly encourage
linking to the photos instead of embedding them (and if you do this, there's
no reason not to stick with the original TIFFs). This will cut down on the
total document size. You can still do this when sending the document out,
but you'll have to send all the photo files with it (if you keep the photos
in the same folder with the document, links will be relative, so they'll
still work when you copy the files to a CD).

When possible, turn on picture placeholders (Tools | Options | View) to
improve performance when dealing with the text. It's also a good idea to
split the table from time to time, as Word has trouble dealing with long
tables (but can handle multiple tables well); see
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/TblsFldsFms/FastTables.htm

Others will probably have more (and possibly better) advice.
 
X

XP

Thank you for your input Suzanne.

I plan to have a commercial printer print and bind the book.
I like the image linking idea, however, there is no way a CD will hold all
that data. Thanks for the info about the tables, we are on the same page <g>
there.

On reflection, I may create each MS-Word page as a separate saved document,
then convert these to individual PDF's, then combine all into a single PDF.
To be honest I think that approach would provide the most stability. This
would also make editing fast and easy.

Thanks again Suzanne, feel to post again if more thoughts occur to you.
 
S

Suzanne S. Barnhill

Sending the page to the commercial printer as a PDF is a good idea if you
have this capability. Given the structure of your document, creating it page
by page is not too unreasonable, though I would suggest perhaps a somewhat
larger division (maybe "bundles" of ten or a dozen pages). Also, keep in
mind that if you want running heads, page numbers, a TOC, etc., there are
advantages to keeping everything in one document.
 
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