In converting Publisher documents to PDF for use on our church website, I find that some of the resulting documents are huge. The cause is not hard to find, it is the embedded graphics. The maker of the document finds a graphic they like drag it down to the size they want and put it in place. In printing, it doesn’t matter much that they have taken a 4 x 6 pic and squeezed it to 1 x 1.25. When converted to PDF, however, ( I use the free PDFCreator), that multi-MB graphic is still multi-MB.
It is easy enough for me to take out the graphic, use Irfanview to actually reduce the size of the graphic and stick it back in, making the resulting PDF more reasonable in size. It is easy enough for me to do that once. Doing it for every graphic in every pub every week would be a nuisance. I don’t think it likely that I am going to be able to convince the church staff to adjust the graphics as they use them, either. They are in a hurry and, besides, the print quality they need is higher than the screen quality I need in the PDFs.
Word 2003 has a very nice function that optimizes the graphics in an entire document. Solves this kind of problem with ease. Unfortunately, Publisher 2003 does not appear to have such a function. Does anyone know of an automated (or at least easier) method of doing this? Preferably something that could be run after the fact.
