Hi Kristy:
Yes, that's correct. The .DOCX format is (or can be...) more compact than
PDF.
However: the version of PDF made by the "free" tools in OS X (which Word
also uses) create PDF version 1.1, which has neither compression nor file
size reduction.
You can handle this one of two ways:
1) Buy Adobe Acrobat for $300. Acrobat enables you to create PDF level 3
(or higher, I haven't looked for a while...). This has lots of options you
can enable to shrink the file size.
2) Shrink the graphics graphics before you insert them in the Word
document. This is what professionals do: it gives them greater control over
the results (and of course they then use Acrobat...)
Let me explain... A "Document" can be considered to have two kinds of
content: "Text" and "Pictures".
Text is highly compressible, and can be reduced to about a quarter of its
size quite easily. Word does this automatically in .DOCX format.
Pictures are much more complex. If the pictures are photos, they were
probably already compressed in the camera and they won't compress any
further. I could go on for pages about the various graphics formats: some
will compress, most won't. Let's just assume that they are as compressed as
they're going to get.
In Adobe Acrobat, you can select a "quality" level. What this does is
shrink the pictures by discarding pixels (it makes the pictures fuzzy). If
you choose to use "Print Publishing" quality, no information is removed, and
the pictures are huge. There are several other grades, down to "Email"
which re-samples the pictures down to 96 dots per inch, with dramatic
savings in file size.
If you do not want to pay $300 for Acrobat, you can do the same thing for
yourself
1) Decide how your reader will use your document. There are basically
three quality levels you need to choose from: Professional Publishing,
Office Printing, and Web or Email.
2) Open each picture in an Image Editor (GraphicConverter is excellent and
cheap, iPhoto will pass if you're desperate and it's free, PhotoShop CS4 is
the industry standard, $700 and worth it if you are doing a lot of this!)
3) First crop the picture so it shows only what you want the reader to see.
You can both scale and crop in Word, but if you do, Word only alters the
Zoom level, it does not remove any size from the picture. So don't do that,
because it means you are sending a larger file than you need to.
4) Then set the SIZE of the image to the size you want it to be when it
prints.
5) Now set the RESOLUTION of the image according to the choice you made in
step 1
* For Professional Publishing, leave the resolution at whatever the
original is, and expect the document to be huge (forget emailing it
anywhere...)
* For Office printing, set the resolution to 600 dpi (300 dpi if you want
to email the document). Office printers can't tell the difference, but
fashion magazines won't accept the image.
* For web or email, set the resolution to 96 dpi. That's all the viewer's
screen will display; there is no point in sending more resolution than that,
the screen will simply remove it. But it will look a bit fuzzy if they
print it.
6) Now press OK. Make both the size change and the resolution change in a
single step, to enable the image editor to do the best possible job. If you
do it as two changes, you may remove information you actually need for the
second step.
7) Now save your picture and insert it into your document.
When you convert to PDF, you will see a dramatic size difference. An 8
megapixel image from my camera is 3,264 by 2,448 pixels and takes about 1.5
megabytes on disk, saved in JPEG at medium compression.
Down-sized to 320 x 240 at 96 dpi for emailing, it's about 92 kb, 0.092
megabytes. See the difference?
Hope this helps
This email is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless you intend to pay!
--
John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:
[email protected]
