Comments on: SoFoBoMo: Crossing the finish line early.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 13:11:10 +0000

@Anil, I’m glad that it worked out for you. ISSUU is a great service and I really liked the output that it provided, too.

By: Anil

Anil — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:51:42 +0000

Paul

Thanks for all the info! I figured it out. One needs to set the DPI to 72 and compression/quality to LOW for uploading the book to ISSUU. For the actual PDF to be distributed for printing on a CD or whatever, the file size in immaterial and therefore full resolution without any compression is desirable.

Did a test to ISSUU and it worked just… great!

Anil

By: earl

earl — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:00:23 +0000

Paul,

I have Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional and would be happy to try and compress ANYONE’s PDF copy of their book. As a trial I download at 18mb and was able to compress it to 2.3mb and still have decent quality. I’ll send you the compressed file if you would like to look at it.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 10:23:34 +0000

Anil, my book is only 63 pages and just happened to be 18 MB. I tried everything that I could to get it smaller, but I couldn’t do it. I searched on the Internet to find a solution for it and found that Scribus is written to output for printing press (CMYK) and doesn’t do much PDF compression, preferring quality over size.

There are some PDF compression products, but I didn’t find any free ones. Some of them cost $300-$500. I tried a demo, it reduced the size from 18 MB to 2.8 MB. However, it adds a huge watermark on each page and scrambles all of the text.

There is a Wikipedia entry about some perl compression script, but I didn’t try it.

Regarding opening the book in PDF, you need to have the pages display side by side.

View->Page Display->Two Up
View->Page Display->Show Cover Page During Two-up

If you are viewing it directly in your browser, click on the page icon to show pages side by side.

By: Anil

Anil — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:51:00 +0000

Arrgh! All those spelling errors.

contaol = control
viaible = visible

By: Anil

Anil — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:48:41 +0000

Paul

I’ve looked at Gordon’s and your finished product [book] and both are fabulous.
I have a few questions to you regarding the creation of the Scribus book, outputting that to a PDF etc:
- How did you contaol the file size? Mine is going in to the 100′s of MB already and its not even half way done. You seem to have managed to keep the resolution high, but the resulting file size is managable for the net. How?
- How does one get a book to “open” like yours where it looks like a book on a table with 2 pages viaible at one time? Mine ends up one flat page at a time!

Appreciate if could share some of the knowledge.

Anil.

By: Anil

Anil — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 05:39:50 +0000

If the “bar got raised” it is because we look at what other did/have done and not necessarily try to better what is done by others, but try to improve on ones own efforts and techniques. Because the bar got raised I learned *even more* from others, I am grateful for that.