[SoFoBoMo] PDF madness
I've just spent the last 4 hours fighting with InDesign and Acrobat.
You see, CreateSpace only gives you 100 megs for the body of your book. InDesign really wants to export my book as a 104-109M PDF, which is really obnoxious given that there's about 1K of text and 90M of images in it. I tried changing the compression settings. I tried telling it to resize my images (I'd just grabbed them at full size...). I tried resizing each image manually and re-linking them (which had the images adding up to 50M before being imported into InDesign). CreateSpace said to tell it to auto-resize to 305PPI if it was larger than 320PPI. None of those really made a difference. I could get a few megs here or there, but not the shrinking I needed. I'd reduce the size of the images by 50%, and InDesign would still spit out a huge file.
I tried reading the help files.
They said to use Acrobat to shrink the PDF, using a "reduce file size" command, which did a marvelous job - except it downsampled everything to 100 DPI or so. If I wanted my stuff to look like crap there are easier ways.
Eventually I hit upon telling it to resize to 250PPI if the image was more than 250PPI. That's lower resolution than I'd like, but at this point I just want something I can upload.
I've done that. Now CreateSpace has to approve my submission. With any luck I can order my proof copy tomorrow.
You see, CreateSpace only gives you 100 megs for the body of your book. InDesign really wants to export my book as a 104-109M PDF, which is really obnoxious given that there's about 1K of text and 90M of images in it. I tried changing the compression settings. I tried telling it to resize my images (I'd just grabbed them at full size...). I tried resizing each image manually and re-linking them (which had the images adding up to 50M before being imported into InDesign). CreateSpace said to tell it to auto-resize to 305PPI if it was larger than 320PPI. None of those really made a difference. I could get a few megs here or there, but not the shrinking I needed. I'd reduce the size of the images by 50%, and InDesign would still spit out a huge file.
I tried reading the help files.
They said to use Acrobat to shrink the PDF, using a "reduce file size" command, which did a marvelous job - except it downsampled everything to 100 DPI or so. If I wanted my stuff to look like crap there are easier ways.
Eventually I hit upon telling it to resize to 250PPI if the image was more than 250PPI. That's lower resolution than I'd like, but at this point I just want something I can upload.
I've done that. Now CreateSpace has to approve my submission. With any luck I can order my proof copy tomorrow.