Compressing Newsletters

I just got a pdf of a newsletter. It was great. Lots of nice stories that kept my attention, lots of pictures and a nice layout. My problem was it was 7 megabytes. Some of the people in my club do not have cable modems and getting the file into their house is a problem. I just finished my July newsletter using MS Publisher. The publisher file contained 18 pictures and the Publisher version was 44 Meg. As I was laying it out I cropped most of the pictures to fit what I was doing. When I was happy with what I had done, I right clicked on a picture and selected the compress icon and told publisher to compress the file. It throws away the cropped edges and readjusts the resolution for viewing on a screen. My 44 Meg file went to 14 Meg when I compressed it for commercial printing and 2.5 Meg when I compressed it for web viewing. When I made a pdf file out of the 14 Meg version it went to a pdf file that was 1.9 Meg. If I compressed the web viewing version it went to 1.3 Meg. To avoid confusion, I make one file that's the same for the printer and to view and this month I settled for 1.9Meg. People keep increasing the bandwidth into their houses, but we still need to to make it easy for people to get the electronic version and wean them off the hard copy. Stamps and printing are expensive.

Bill

http://iroquoisaaca.org/downloads/Newsletters/2012/July%2012.pdf

Hi Bill.

It took me 14-15 seconds to download your PDF newsletter. We have a Verizon WIFI (hotspot), which is only being used by me at this morning. I would say that's normal for PDF newsletters.

Our region's president/editor uses his "compress" feature for our newsletter too. I have never compared his way verses my way. I'm old school. When I was the editor, I always used my picture program to bring the bytes down to 300 or less, unless it was a front page picture. I resized the picture after I cropped it. So I guess you and I got to the “house”, but just used a different “road”. I’ll get Judy Edwards to make a comment too, since she is more active with newsletters now than I am now.

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Forgot to mention, our region has members that cannot view a PDF too. Dialup is a pain in the country.<O:p</O:p