(PDFs) just curious, how are you making your PDFs? do you have Acrobat, or are you saving them as PDFs in Photoshop or another application? i ask because it makes a difference in filesize. in my experience, Acrobat makes PDFs more efficiently and saves them as much smaller files than PDFs made with another method. (Acrobat also gives you options to tweak the files and make them even smaller, while Photoshop or another app just does a straight coversion and doesn’t allow you to edit.)
i looked at your KQ7 interview and it looks great, it also printed out fine (on my b&w laser printer at work). i tried messing with it a little in acrobat and photoshop but wasn’t able to; i’m not sure if this is due to how the PDF was made or if you copy protected it or something.
so, i saved a copy of the scanned page from interaction magazine that’s at the top of this therad. the .jpeg was 344k. i tried saving it as a PDF in Photoshop and it spiked up to 616k. when i exported the same file to a PDF using Acrobat, the file size went down to 316k. (this was without any tweaking on my part.) it’s possible that if i messed with it some more, i could make the file even smaller without sacrificing quality. i printed out both PDFs (again, in black and white) and there isn’t a noticeable difference between the two.
just seems like transcribing the text of the articles would be a lot of work for you, plus you’d lose graphic elements and layout from the original spreads (and trying to replicate them would be even more work for you). i believe acrobat looks at text and graphics equally, so i’m not sure that transcribing all that text is really giving you a smaller file size. not sure about this, though.
i’d be happy to email you the two PDFs i made so you can see the difference (or lack thereof!) in the files. just let me know.
-emily
ps you’re probably right about the dpi and my scanner… my scanner is pretty low end.
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