Graphics??? Another Question for PDF Publishers

[KeithBVaughn]

Hello again all,

I'm scanning some of my artwork for "Planets of Peril" and finding the final files large to say the least. I normally scan 300 dpi tiffs so I have a good basis to alter the picture in photoshop for insertion in the manuscript.

Now the question; what kind of format do you use for graphics (pictures) in your PDF's? Do you use GIF, JPEG, TIFF, bitmap or what. Right now I've got mostly black and white with a few-very few-color pics. I'm just trying to get a handle on this to keep the file size down to reasonable and keep the quality from looking like crap.

Thanks in Advance,
Keith

[greyorm]

300 dpi is usually a good bet for a PDF if you intend the work to look good when printed out. For the black-and-white lineart, make sure you convert it to grayscale and bump brightness/contrast to get rid of any unwanted shades leftover from the scan that your eye is not detecting. That should help reduce the file-size.

If you want to save more space and have no intention of the PDF being printed out -- or at least don't care what it looks like printed out -- you could even drop this to 150 dpi to significantly reduce the size. Also, if you are using Adobe Acrobat to make the PDF file, there are options that will help you reduce the file size contained therein if you hunt around a little.

Ultimately, though, I wouldn't worry about it in these days of cable modems, high speed internet access, and high Gigabyte hard drives: even 25meg files are a blip. The other option, if it still concerns you, is to provide an art-free download of the product to keep file size down.

[Paul Czege]

For My Life with Master I placed 300 dpi TIFF images into the layout file. I restrained Acrobat from downsampling the images when I made the pdf for the printer, and let Acrobat downsample the illustrations to 100 dpi for the "screen" version.

Lately, for color and greyscale I've had good success with the PNG image format. For straight black and white art, with no anti-aliasing, I've done 1200 dpi TIFF and the image sizes are still very small.

I recommend against JPEG. PNG is better in all cases, as it doesn't sacrifice detail in compressing the image.

Paul