Publisher newsletter production problems

[Garry Clarke]

We use Publisher 2000 at my work to produce a community newspaper of about 12
A4 pages (3 x A3 printed double side). We have had a lot of trouble working
with Project, taking very long time to produce each document. The documents
have a number of digital photos embedded. Problems include taking up to 50
minutes to save a document (document size is ranging from 200 to over 500
mb), during which time you obviously can't work on it, text formatting
changing when manipulating photos, difficulty in working with text boxes.

The staff using the program claim that Publisher is not up to the task of
producing a newsletter of the type described and are pushing for us to spend
a lot of money on Adobe Creative Suite, for the programs InDesign CS and
Photoshop CS. One of the main claimed shortcomings of Publisher is that it
embeds images in the document, rather than linking to them as Adobe
apparently does, and that this is why the documents are so large and thus so
clumsy to manage.

I am happy to spend the money on the Adobe product if it is needed, but
first I would like comment from Publsiher users on the problems we are
encountering.

 

[Ed Bennett]

A small child turns to Ed, and exclaims: "Look! Look! A post from Garry

The staff using the program claim that Publisher is not up to the
task of producing a newsletter of the type described and are pushing
for us to spend a lot of money on Adobe Creative Suite, for the
programs InDesign CS and Photoshop CS.

InDesign has sa much steeper learning curve than Publisher, and so it is
much harder to get started using InDesign in the way you can use Publisher

One of the main claimed
shortcomings of Publisher is that it embeds images in the document,
rather than linking to them as Adobe apparently does, and that this
is why the documents are so large and thus so clumsy to manage.

This is not so much to do with embedding vs. linking, it is an issue in
Publisher 2000 and below. Publisher 2000 and below store images in
uncompressed BMP format (they decompress all images on import), massively
inflating the filesize.
Publisher 2003 will either compress using PNG or preserve the original
filetype internally - whichever produces the smaller filesize. This brings
the filesize down by a large scale.
Publisher still embeds photos by default, and if the "Link" option is
selected, a copy of the photo is still retained within the file (so that if
you delete the source photo, it isn't removed from the file) - but it will
update when the source photo is updated.

 

[DavidF]

In addition to what Ed said, the following applies to newsletters, file size
and Publisher 2000:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;218725&Product=pub20
00

DavidF

 

[Ed Bennett]

A small child turns to Ed, and exclaims: "Look! Look! A post from

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;218725&Product=pub20
00

Fixed url:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;218725&Product=pub2000
(if that still breaks, despite OE's promises, this TinyURL will do it -
http://tinyurl.com/6r3wg)