Acrobat documents

[Dagobahn Eagle]

I'm close to finishing my Star Wars: Dawning rulebook. Problem is, with all the illustrations, mostly eye-candy, that I'm putting into it, it's close to 30MB big (a bit big for a 20-page document). So I'm thinking about converting the WORD document to something smaller. Same goes for the ship library. I would like to put more illustrations and maybe some ship pics in there, but if the file becomes to big when I do I won't be able to.

 

If I can't find a way to compress the document (zipping shrinks it, but not enough), I'll have to remove a ton of pics from the rulebook and lower the detail of the remaining ones from BMP to JPG, which I don't want to do for obvious reasons.

 

Do anyone know of a document format that can store pictures as part of them without taking up too much space? I've heard Acrobat documents do, is this right? In that case, how can I convert a .DOC document to a .PDF document?

 

Come on, reply and help make Dawning happen !

[coupes.]

it's hard to compress pictures as they are already compressed so you might want to compress your pics more to reduce to size of your file.

 

as for .pdf document i'm not sure how to make one, but i think you need Adobe Acrobat, not only Acrobat Reader.

[BCanr2d2]

Exactly, you need Acrobat itself, which does the writing, and not Acrobat reader.....

 

Now, I am not too sure with PDF file size, but if you changed the bitmaps to jpgs, you would have smaller files without loosing too much of the quality, as long as you did it right.

 

I do have it here at home, but have never really used it too much, only to really save online shopping receipts, since I don't have a printer.

[Acrylic]

Originally posted by Dagobahn Eagle

I'm close to finishing my Star Wars: Dawning rulebook. Problem is, with all the illustrations, mostly eye-candy, that I'm putting into it, it's close to 30MB big (a bit big for a 20-page document). So I'm thinking about converting the WORD document to something smaller. Same goes for the ship library. I would like to put more illustrations and maybe some ship pics in there, but if the file becomes to big when I do I won't be able to.

 

If I can't find a way to compress the document (zipping shrinks it, but not enough), I'll have to remove a ton of pics from the rulebook and lower the detail of the remaining ones from BMP to JPG, which I don't want to do for obvious reasons.

 

Do anyone know of a document format that can store pictures as part of them without taking up too much space? I've heard Acrobat documents do, is this right? In that case, how can I convert a .DOC document to a .PDF document?

 

Come on, reply and help make Dawning happen !

 

Well, i saw in a dell add, you can get Acrobat 5 for 215 US dollars. Or...you can get it another way.

[mima kake]

You need a registred version of acrobat. (not just the reader)

There's a little plugin called distiller wich can make pdf's from all sorts of files.

[StormHammer]

As others have already stated, you need the full Acrobat program to be able to make PDFs...although you could potentially find a free PDF writing ap on the net somewhere. I know there are other applications now that allow you to write PDFs.

 

Anyway, as to the file size, the problem really is the graphic format you are using. Even if you translate the whole thing into PDF, it will still be a massive file because it won't be able to compress the graphics without making them look rubbish. I've found it's better to compress the images outside of the Acrobat, and turn off image compression within Acrobat's settings. If you converted them to .JPG files, and compressed them at around 95%, you wouldn't see many artefacts, but you'll probably see a significant reduction in image file size. Another option is to reduce the colours to 256 and save as .Gif files, but that's not always a guarantee of small file sizes, and depending on the type of graphic, you might see a noticeable degradation of image quality.

 

Hope that helps.

[Dagobahn Eagle]

Well, the whole problem is that JPG pics are blurry, not that they are low-detailed. When playing SW: U, blur is a significant problem when you're supposed to copy-paste icons (ie. when you "deploy" units by pasting them into the battle map) and try to designate a transparent colour, which will make pasting easier.

 

I am trying to find something that could automate placing/moving of ships and warheads (in fact, someone or something that could automate the whole game), but so far I haven't found anything.

 

So the possibilities are either to

 

1. Leave out the images mostly (eye-candy)

 

2. Convert them all to very low-detail.

 

3. Find a good compressor (don't think anything can convert pics to greatly, though).

[The_One]

If you have Photoshop 6.0 onwards, there is a brilliant option for optimising JPEGs. As others have said, it's the BMPs that are taking up all your space :S

[StormHammer]

Originally posted by Dagobahn Eagle

Well, the whole problem is that JPG pics are blurry, not that they are low-detailed. When playing SW: U, blur is a significant problem when you're supposed to copy-paste icons (ie. when you "deploy" units by pasting them into the battle map) and try to designate a transparent colour, which will make pasting easier.

 

Well, for the icons...do you need 16 million colours, or will 256 suffice? You can save as .Gifs, because then you can retain the transparency information within the .Gif file itself. The more you can reduce the colour range, the smaller the resulting image file size. All you do then is pick the colour you want to set to transparency in the .Gif itself prior to saving it.

 

Personally, I don't see that .jpg's are blurry anyway. I've never had any problem with the image quality of .jpg files. :/

[BCanr2d2]

C'mon you can jump back a level to 16-bit, 65K of colour, not back to the 8-bit amount of 256, even if he wanted to keep them as BMPs......

[-=ReApEr=-]

Bmp's are horrible and big i would just make them jpg's way easier dude and i got a few copy's of adobe if u need some